Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/106

 description of their journey through Mongolia and Tibet; and we ourselves, in 1872, saw a wall of this kind on the borders of Ala-shan and Kan-su.

We passed five days at Kalgan, where we met with the greatest kindness from M. Matrenitsky and some others of our countrymen, who, in their mercantile capacity, manage the tea-carrying trade for the Russian firms at Hankau. Their residences are outside the town of Kalgan, near the entrance of the beautiful valley by which we descended: a situation which has the advantage of escaping the dirt and smells, — those inseparable adjuncts of every town in the Celestial Empire.

Like other foreigners in China, the Russians at Kalgan transact business through the medium of compradors, i.e. Chinese who are entrusted to conduct negotiations with their countrymen; but some of the Kalgan merchants know enough Chinese to do business for themselves, and others are brought into direct intercourse with the Mongol carriers. At Tien-tsin, however, and all the other ports of China open to Europeans, every mercantile house must have its compradors. They transact all the business, and rob their employers so outrageously that in a few years a comprador is generally able to set up a business establishment of his own.

The compradors living with foreigners learn to speak the language of their master, whatever may be his nationality. The Russian language is less easily acquired than any other, on account of the difficulty of pronouncing the words and mastering