Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/108

 for all Europeans, and from the nickname applied to all of us of Yang-kwei-tsz, i.e. 'foreign devil.'

The European will hear himself called by no other name; and on our first entrance into China Proper we experienced all the miseries which await the traveller from the West within the limits of the Celestial Empire. But of this later. I will now continue my narrative.

With the assistance of our countrymen at Kalgan we hired two riding-horses for the journey to Peking, and some mules for the baggage. Europeans usually travel in litters carried between two mules, but we preferred riding, because we could see the country better in this way than in closed litters.

The distance from Kalgan to Peking is about 140 miles, usually performed in four days. Several halts are made on the road at inns, most of which are kept by Mahomedan emigrants from Eastern Turkestan. Good inns are very difficult of access for the European, who is shown into mean caravanserais, where he is charged double, triple, and even ten times the usual price. But after sitting for six or seven consecutive hours in the saddle, chilled with the night air, one is glad of any shelter. In spite of the well-known liberality of Europeans, such is the hatred to the 'foreign devils' that we were sometimes refused a night's lodging, notwithstanding the intervention of our Chinese mule-drivers. This befell us at the town of Sha-chang, where we were obliged to ride for an hour from one inn to another, offering ten times the usual charge, before obtaining shelter in a dirty, cold room.