Near the mission also there is a pretty Mohammedan mosque, built exactly like a Buddhist or Taoist temple, which provides schools for boys and girls. The girls’ school is a recent institution, probably in imitation of the mission one, and is evidently at all events a numerical success, for a good number of girls filed out on Sunday afternoon as we happened to be passing. The type of face of many of the boys struck us as particularly Semitic, and the Chinese here habitually call them Jews. There is a large proportion of butchers among the Mohammedans, as is usually the case in China, and this is a boon to Europeans, for it is only the Mohammedans who kill beef, and they are particular about the healthiness of the beasts. The Moslems in China do not attempt to proselytise openly, and they adhere less rigidly than elsewhere to their religious observances. They conform outwardly as much as possible to Chinese customs in order to escape notice, but they are no negligible quantity among the myriads of that land, for they number at least twenty millions. The Mohammedans entered China in A.D. 755 by the regular trade route through Central Asia, and even earlier (in 628) according to Chinese Mohammedan tradition they are said to have sent the prophet’s uncle as envoy to the Chinese court. The proselytising of the Chinese was as peaceful as that of the Indians was the reverse. It was mainly achieved by Moslem traders and artisans, following in the wake of Genghiz Khan and Kubla Khan’s conquests. They married Chinese women, and their children all became Moslems; they adopted large numbers of other children in famine times in order to bring them up in the Faith, and thus they have steadily but unobtrusively grown in numbers. In past times there have been terrible massacres of the Mohammedans by the Chinese whenever they have made any attempt to withstand Chinese customs, which is probably the reason one hears so little of them nowadays, but they show a quiet tenacity in sticking to their religion, which is characteristic of Mohammedanism in every land. It was in a vain endeavour to reach them that the great Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, died off the coast of China. Up to the present time there has been no special mission work amongst the Mohammedans in China. My sketch of the Mohammedan mosque at Ashiho was done under considerable difficulties, for the boys had just come out of school, and would jostle up and down, and round about me on the mound of earth where I was sitting, raising such a dust that at last I was driven defeated from the field. Though it was the first of May the scene was a winter one, and we longed and longed for spring to arrive.