CULTURAL RELATIONS ON THE KANSU-TIBETAN
BORDER

By

Robert B. Ekvall

The University of Chicago Press

1977

FOREWORD

The account that follows was prepared by Mr. Ekvall as a result of his
participation in the Seminar on Racial and Cultural Contacts held under the
auspices of the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of
Chicago.  During 1987-38 the Seminar was maintained under the direction of
the undersigned.  Mr. Ekvall delivered a paper to the Seminar: this was
discussed, and thereafter Mr. Ekvall expended his contribution into the longer
document that is here published.  The Department of Anthropology of the
University is to be thanked for allowing the inclusion of the paper in one of
its publication series, and has provided funds to make publication possible.

The account throws light upon a number of little known groups living in an
isolated part of the world.  The information we have on the peoples of this
area is very meager.  Students of society will welcome new dependable facts
about them.  It should be stated, however, that the materials included here
are only a small part of what the author knows about the groups on the
Kansu-Tibetan border.  In spite of the fact that his memory is aided by few
notes, he is able to reproduce in remarkable detail the characteristics of life
in that area as he lived it for many years in great intimacy with the natives
and in possession of the necessary linguistic knowledge.  We asked Mr.
Ekvall to begin the preparation of an account of the composition and mode of
life of one nomadic Tibetan tent-group in which he had lived; this second
manuscript, as yet unpublished, indicates the amount of detailed descriptive
information which he is able to produce.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Ekvall will continue his study of the area.
As a result of political developments in the East, the region, long isolated, is
being brought into a larger organization of society, characterized by the
development of international relations, of more organized warfare, and of wider
cultural contacts.  It would be well if these changes could be followed as
they occur by one already familiar with the old life.

The Seminar on Racial and Cultural Contacts has for three years served as a
forum within which members of the staff of the Division interested in the
effects of contacts between societies and cultures could submit their varying
points of view to criticism.  It has also served as a place in which
observers of particular cases of such contacts could present their facts with
the hope of improving understanding of the relevance of the of the later sort;
indeed, it is the clearest possible example, for the author came to his facts
with no previous theoretical interests in the nature of social change.  He
is an excellent reporter of the facts as simple facts.  So his account
becomes a test of the possibility of relating such relatively unguided
particular observations to more general considerations.

In summarizing his observations for himself, Mr. Ekvall has called our
attention to some of the advantages of the region for study of general
characteristics of inter-group contacts.  Within a small area are to be
found easily identifiable ethnic groups, each with its own culture and social
organization.  Among these groups the lines of contact are simple and may
be isolated and described effectively.  Furthermore the nature of the
contacts between any two of these ethnic groups is interestingly different from
that characterizing the contacts between any other two.  The diagram at the
end of the paper gives Mr. Ekvall's designations of these differences.
Whether or not we are to agree with these designations, we must recognize that
these relatively clean-cut differences within a single area and larger societal
framework provide a sort of concentrated experiment in the field of culture
contacts.

Further observation and consideration might result in more fruitful
comparisons.  What, for example, are the differential effects of modes of
subsistence as compared with religious differences in determining the
character of ethnic relations and of both as compared with the fact of
occupation of a common territory?  Of the four groups involved in this
report the nomadic Tibetans and the Moslem Chinese differ most sharply from one
another in language, custom and religion, yet are economically useful to one
another and maintain friendly relations and influence one another.  On the
other hand the Moslem Chinese and the non-Moslem Chinese dwelling in separate
but neighboring villages, differ very little except in religion, and the
relations between these two groups are expressed in hostility and open
conflict.  In the formation of the four major constellations of
relationship what have been the roles of numbers and vitality of
population, of ethnic heritages, religious traditions and practices, forms of
economic organizations and competition for resources?

Mr. Ekvall's preliminary characterizations of the fourfold relationships
suggests the possibility of recognizing more generally applicable categories in
terms of which to classify ethnic relations, as well as of discovering basic
factors and processes which make for fundamentally different relations
between one people and another.  The indicated procedure is the comparison
of one paired combination of ethnic groups with all the other pairs in turn. Mr.
Ekvall characterizes the relationships between Chinese and Moslems as one of
segregation and hostility, whereas that between sedentary Tibetans is one of
infiltration.  Whereas the relationship between nomadic Tibetans and
Moslems involves trade and diffusion of culture, that between nomadic Tibetans
and sedentary Tibetans involves superordination and subordination.  These
characterizations are not to be regarded as mutually exclusive and exhaustive,
yet there is sufficient reason to think that the relations of any one
people to any two others in this area are so different as to warrant further
investigation with a view to the discovery of some major factors in bringing
about types of ethnic relationship.

The four groups differ notably, it appears, in the respective resist
exhibited by the groups to outside influence and also in the areas of life in
which change most easily occurs.  The Mohammedans and the nomadic Tibetans
seem to be tough, or resistant groups.  In contrast the Chinese seem to be
rather soft, but with a kind of cultural depth that yields continuity and
permits the Chinese culture, with a minimum of conflict, to penetrate into that
of other groups.  It might be possible to develop more rigorous ways of
studying these relationships In terms of these differences in psychological
orientation.

Particular interest attaches to the relations between the sedentary and
nomadic Tibetans.  Older theories of cultural development regarded nomadic
life as older than sedentary agricultural life, and presumable as one to be
abandoned for the advantages of the latter.  Here, however, is a situation
in which the nomads not only consider themselves as superior but are
acknowledged to be superior and in which the individual is regarded as improving
his condition if he leaves faming and becomes a nomad.  The situation can
be matched elsewhere, but here is one place in which it could well be
studied.  It would be particularly interesting to study the lines of
cleavage between the nomadic and the sedentary sections of the same tribe and to
make a thorough analysis of their likenesses and differences.  The
differences in mutual aid, in the position of women, and in the amount and
character of wealth have been merely alluded to by Mr. Ekvall.  They
furnish occasion for much further research.

Attention might well center on particular aspects of ethnic relations,
considering these in each of the four pairs of groups in turn.  A
fundamental group of problems is raised by Mr. Ekvall's observations on matters
of population.  The relative fertility of the Chinese and the apparent low
reproduction rate of the Tibetans represents a striking contrast.  The
Tibetans are well organized and aggressive, while the Chinese are less well
organized and much less resistant; yet the Chinese penetrate the Tibetan area
and gain in numbers as the Tibetans lose.  Mr. Ekvall refers to suggestions
in the literature as to the effect of horseback riding upon reproduction.
The roles of disease and of diet are obviously to be reckoned for stud of the
relationship between standard of living and number of children including not
merely the birth rate but the survival rate.  The effects which race,
religion and various cultural factors have upon the vigor and survival of a
people seem to be particularly inviting matters for study in this
area.  In the case of the Moslems the form of family life is an obviously
important element.  Perhaps also the attitudes toward death and danger,
towards survival and solidarity, toward the ancestors and toward small children
are to be related to the population situation.

The role of trade in the economy and social life of the people seems to be
particularly well adapted for study in this area where trade bears some of the
traits of the more primitive commercial relations that existed long ago in
Europe.  The extent to which the cultural tradition operates to establish
certain advantages on the part of one group over another in trade relations is
an interesting issue.  Another contribution to the economic life from the
side of tradition is provided by the conventional guest-host relations referred
to by Mr. Ekvall in which the chains of trading connections are forged out of
personally defined linkages between men in settlements distant from one
another.

The local forms of warfare also invite particular study.  It would be
interesting to discover the functions of feuds, raids and punitive expeditions
in the larger society of the area.  The superiority of the Moslems in this
respect is noteworthy.

This study of Mr. Ekvall represents a case of a marginal area.  Because
of that fact, and because of the interests of the Seminar, it emphasizes
contacts and interrelations between societies and cultures rather than the
independent development of isolated groups.  Nevertheless it calls
attention to the fact that although each group is in contact with others, each
has a culture and a life of its own, and undergoes internal development and
change at the same time that contact from without impinges on it.
Ethnographic depictions of primitive societies not infrequently underestimate
the role of contacts and variations due to contacts.  Reading this account
of Mr. Ekvall's we may over-emphasize contact at the expense of independent
development, Mr. Ekvall knows better than to do this.  In the supplementary
memorandum not yet published he has brought forward facts indicating that
particularly within the Tibetan group there is great range for individual action
and initiative. The trends of Tibetan life are largely determined by the
originating action of Tibetans, with no necessary reference to the effects of
contacts with non-Tibetans.  As compared with other societies, that of
these nomads places an unusual emphasis upon individual enterprise.  A
man's role in the group is largely independent of his membership in any familial
or other group.  Mr. Ekvall's unpublished account impressed one with the
importance that must be attached to powerful personalities in the life of
personal the Tibetan group. Apart from matters of culture contact, the Tibetan
society is apparently one in which it would be profitable to study the way in
which new personal relations emerge between people giving rise to new
orientations upon the part of such individuals and tending to undermine
customary ways of activity.  But these last remarks are introduced here
merely as a sort of caveat; the reader of the pages that follow will not find
this problem presented; he will encounter a description of fourfold inter-ethnic
relations. For this straightforward account Mr. Ekvall is to be thanked.

Herbert Blumer

Ernest Manheim

Robert Redfield

W. Lloyd Warner

Louis Wirth

University of Chicago

PREFACE

I was born on the Kansu-Tibetan border and lived most of the first fourteen
years of my life in that region. I returned to that region as a missionary under
the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1928 and, with the exception of one
year (1927-1928), lived and worked among the peoples of this part of
northwestern China and northeastern Tibet until 1936. The years from l923 tol925
were spent principally among the Chinese and Moslems of the region; from 1928 on
I was for the most part among the Tibetans, though necessity or choice
frequently sent my wife and me to the Chinese side of the border.

Our first station was Titao, in Kansu, where I was in charge of the school
work of the mission. Here, as part-time courtesy teacher in the government
normal school, I was fortunate enough to be in close contact with the scholars
and intellectuals of the region. Other evangelical work took me on many trips
through the Chinese and Moslem districts described in this paper and created
many opportunities for close association with the inhabitants of the Chinese and
Moslem villages. Assignment to various missions brought me in touch, as well,
with some of the Moslem military and religious teachers.

In the summer of 1924, acting as interpreter, I went into the field where the
Swedish archaeologist, Dr. J. G. Andersson, was engaged in uncovering some of
the rich finds of late Neolithic culture. That winter we lived for some time in
a Tibetan village, where we began to study the Tibetan language. Later in 1925
we were assigned to the station of Taochow Old City, immediately on the border
of the Tibetan country; here we continued our study of the language and made
trips of exploration among the inhabitants of the former Tibetan province of
Amdo.

The work of exploration initiated at this time and continued during much of
the period since was undertaken primarily as pioneering work in the cause of
missions in new and unexplored areas. Ekit, in studying the language, tribal
organization, customs, conditions of life, distribution of population, methods
of travel, and in reporting on such information,     we secured
many data of geographical, ethnological, and anthropological interest.
Linguistic problems are closely boundup with missionary endeavor. My own medical
work, augmented by the experience of a three months' tour of the Tibetan country
as interpreter and sponsor for a missionary doctor, enabled me to note various
physiological phenomena associated with health, regional incidence of disease,
and population growth and decline.  Later, I was called into various tribal
councils (once, in the course of a border war with the Chinese, I even acted as
a member of a peace party in making a treaty) and thus had opportunity to
acquire much inside information concerning the political and tribal
organization of the Tibetans and many details of the administration of their
affairs.

Our return to this region in the fall of 1928 brought us for a time into
close association with the Moslems and their leaders in the rebellion of
1928-1930.  The following spring (that is, the spring of 1929), we again
entered the Tibetan country, more or less as refugees, and remained throughout
the fall and winter in the village of Ga-ding-o, in Sam-tsa Rong, sharing the
communal life of it twenty-three families.  From there we undertook a
series of trips among the Sam-tsa and other nomadic tribes and eventually
settled in the lamasery center of Lhamo.  It was not as having passport
rights and privileges, but rather as claiming and receiving favor under the
Tibetan host-guest system of hospitality, that we were able to make this our
base station from 1930 until we left for the United States in 1935.

Our work consisted largely of visiting among the nomadic and sedentary tribes
of the region.  We wore Tibetan clothes and attempted to live as much like
the natives as possible-our tents pitched alongside theirs in the encampment
ring of tents-moving when they moved and sharing the routine of nomadic life
with them.  Thus, with our medical and first-aid work we had opportunity
not only to observe the externals of their life but to learn about many of the
troubles and problems which among themselves would ordinarily not be
mentioned.  In addition we made routine trips to both Chinese and Moslem
centers and to aboriginal tribal communities as well.  In the summer of
1926, we visited the independent kingdom of Ngawa, beyond the knee of the Yellow
River; a second, fairly long stay in that principality, in 1932, included a
visit to one of the Golok tribes, where we became acquainted with some of the
Jarong aboriginals.

From early childhood I have spoken Chinese almost as fluently as
English.  Although my knowledge of Tibetan as a learned language is far
behind my knowledge of Chinese, I have acquired a command of Tibetan, in both
the sedentary and the nomadic dialects, which has been of inestimable value not
only in our missionary work, but also in the gathering of data relative to
culture contact on the Kansu-Tibetan border.

Much of the material to be presented was drawn from first-hand observation;
much, also, is the product of interviews with Chinese, Moslem, and Tibetan
scholars and leaders.  This latter material, revealing as it does their
several and widely dissimilar view points, has special significance and many
others of our friends have made their unconscious, but real, contributions to
this study of culture contact.

In writing this monograph, I drew largely upon my memory of conditions as
they existed during my stay on the Kansu-Tibetan border, supplementing it with a
careful check of such maps, travel notes, and manuscripts as I have with me in
the United States.  Discussion and close comparison with my wife, when I
felt that two memories were more to be trusted than one, have further clarified
the report.  The documentation of this monograph is rather slight, but I
have taken every possible precaution that the presentation should be a fair and
factual treatment of the culture contact between the peoples of the
Chinese-Tibetan frontier.

There is little literature extant dealing with the region under
consideration; only a few travelers and scientists, and those at infrequent
intervals, have come to this section of the border.  In the short
bibliography given at the end of the paper attention is called to those writers
who have specifically or incidentally contributed to this paper.

I. THE KANSU-TIBETAN BORDER

Our travels have taken us to points considerably beyond the rectangle lying
between 102 and 104 degrees east longitude and 34 and 88 degrees north latitude,
but the peoples and conditions described in this paper are for the most part to
be found within that area.  It lies on the border between the province of
Kansu-a part of China proper-and that portion of northeastern Tibet
formerly known as the province of Amdo, since tagged with a Chinese name to
indicate a regime of Chinese control which is largely nonexistent.
The map which accompanies this paper will serve to specify further the strictly
geographic aspects of this region.

The matter of elevation deserves some particularization.  The lowest
point of the entire area-along its northern limit, in the valley of the Yellow
River--is somewhat over 6000 feet above sea level, and the higher extreme of
human habitation within this quadrangle extends to more than 14,000 feet
elevation.  In much a range are created a number of climatic zones, between
the lowest and highest of which occur greater differences of temperature than
are to be found in a spread of twenty to thirty degrees of latitude.  In
general, the farther north one travels in this area, the warmer it is;
conversely, the farther south one goes, the colder it is.  The differences
in elevation also make for striking differences in rainfall.  The lower
areas appear to be regions of declining rainfall and increasing aridity, while
in the higher levels there is abundant precipitation during the summer months
One generalization holds good for the entire area: the winters are dry and cold,
the precipitation coming largely during the summer months.  Seasons are
much like those in the northern United States, except that seasonal changes
follow more closely the changes of the solar year (mid-winter is nearer the
winter solstice, etc.). The diurnal range of temperature is much greater; in
some parts of the upper steppe country, the variation may be as much as sixty
degrees in twenty-four hours.

The eastern and northern portion- mainly that in which the Chinese and Moslem
populations are located- is part of the loess region of North China.  This
deposit varies in thickness anywhere from a few feet on the western fringes of
the 'white earth region" to a maximum layer several hundred feet in depth.
Along the border between the Chinese and the Tibetan communities, this layer is
broken by a number of barrier limestone ranges interspersed with sandstone,
shale, and slate formations.  Little mineral is mined in a primitive
fashion, and a few isolated deposits of copper, iron, and lead are worked.
The only mineral wealth exported from the region is salt from the Tibetan salt
lakes.

The distribution of the loess formation has an important bearing on the
agricultural economy of the region.  Wherever that rich and seemingly
inexhaustible soil is found with enough moisture present or assured by
irrigation, excellent harvests are assured year after year without fallow
fields, by simple rotation of crops combined with the Chinese method of
fertilization.  Most of the Chinese and Moslem villages are in the region
of the loess deposit.  Wherever that formation gives way to the clays and
marls of the border country the yearly yield is much less.  Even in the
Tibetan faming country, the best land is found wherever the erratically
distributed pockets of loess are located.

The higher country- the steppe or semi-steppe of the Tibetan plateau has
practically none of this soil; its place is taken by alluvial deposits, glacial
debris, and the thin, stony soil of the mountain ranges.  Those same
mountains, in the belt between 7,000 and 11,000 feet in elevation, are covered
on the northern slopes with a fair growth of timber or brush, the principal
trees being spruce, juniper, birch, and a number of varieties of poplar and
willow.  The slopes facing the south are invariably bare of trees,
presenting sharply defined areas of alternating grazing country and
woodland.  Besides giving the landscape a distinctive aspect, this
condition also affects the agricultural economy of the people in the vicinity,
who combine exploitation of the timber and pastures with routine faming. The
loess region, on the other hand, sustains almost no timber and is on the whole
barren and desolate in appearance.

The limits of agriculture in this region are found at about 11,000 feet above
sea level.  The true tree line is much harder to estimate, for it would
seem that much of the treeless steppe is considerably lower than the level at
which forest actually flourish when given the right combination of
circumstances.  Above 12, 000 feet the steppe is absolutely bare of even
the lowest bushes, but in the higher mountains stunted trees are found up to
elevations of 14,000 feet.  Good grazing lands can be found as high as
16,000 feet, although domesticated animals are never grazed so high.  From
observations made near the great snow mountain, Nyn-bir-yir-tse, beyond the knee
of the Yellow River, I estimate the snow-line at about 17,000 feet.

This region, with its diversified soil, topography, and climate, supports
equally diversified peoples with along though little known history behind
them.  From his studies of Neolithic culture, Dr. Andersson came to believe
that it must have been over four thousand years ago that the Chinese migration
entered the Yellow River basin at this point where their descendants still live.
At different times the unidentified peoples of Hor, the Mongols, the Tanguts,
the Ouigour Tartars, Sarts from Samarkand, and Arab mercenaries lived in, or
marched through, the land.  In still later times Chinese military colonists
established outposts on the border or dispossessed the more obscure aboriginal
peoples, some of whom have left racial or linguistic fragments to the present
day, while others have vanished, leaving traces of themselves only in some
peculiar custom or odd accent in the speech of the peoples of today.  About
six hundred years ago, another immigration from Central Tibet brought an
additional racial and linguistic strain to the Tibetans of the region, who
themselves came from no one knows where.

Although far removed from the outside world- not more than a few years ago it
was a long month's caravan travel from the extremity of the railway (for which
Japanese and Chinese armies are battling so fiercely today) to reach this
frontier region- the people of the region had their part in the larger history
of the past.  Fu-hsi the legendary founder of Chinese civilization lived
here, kings and emperors had their origin here, Marco Polo passed this way; for
then, as now, the old caravan road of Central Asia- one of the silk
roads-followed the long panhandle of China that reaches between Tibet and
Mongolia, passing through the Jade gate to Turkestan and the lost cities of the
Central Asian deserts.  Today military necessity has opened that road;
Soviet emissaries, followers of the Panchen Lama who are working for the Chinese
Central Government, and Tibetans from Lhasa, with British influence behind them,
spread their diverse views among the tribesmen of the region.

In the time of the Manchu dynasty, the entire region was administered by a
viceroy of the Imperial Government.  That portion of the country occupied
by Chinese Moslems and some other, smaller, racial units was under traditional
Chinese law.  The Tibetans enjoyed almost complete independence and varying
degrees of prestige.  The Chone Prince ruled over the forty-eight "banners"
of one group of Tibetans; other Tibetan rulers or chiefs held grants or
commissions- some of them hundreds of years old- from the Imperial
Government.  At that time the ethnic frontier corresponded almost exactly
with the administrative frontier.

Since the establishment of the Republic in 1912, changes have occurred.
Although the region nominally owes allegiance to the Central Government of
China, the administration has been split between Moslem and Chinese
factions.  As a consequence, what was one province has been split up into
two, the Moslems having a controlling influence in the governmental affairs of
one, the Chinese dominating the other.  The territory they separately
administer does not altogether fall into this neat division.  Conditions
have changed most radically along the border, and the Chinese government has
attempted to exercise considerably more power over the Tibetans than
formerly.  This has resulted in the establishment of a greater degree of
control over the Tibetans along the border but has alienated those Tibetans who
persistently maintained their independence, even enhancing that independence,
which is combined with a half-wistful nostalgia for the days of the
Empire.  At the time we left to return to the United States in 1935, agents
from Mongolia were seeking to use this condition to create a receptive mood
towards Japanese influence.

The economic life of the area can be briefly summed up as pastoral,
agricultural, and commercial.  Wheat, millet, barley, and other such grains
are raised for local consumption.  Of the agricultural products, only
tobacco figures as an item of export in a trade which is maintained in spite of
the very considerable difficulties of transportation to the outside world.
Pure pastoralism is found only among the Tibetans; but both Chinese and Moslem
farmers raise some sheep, and this deviation from a strictly agricultural
economy forms one source of the supply of lambskins.  Trade is of two
kinds: Tibetan trade and that which comes from the coast region of China and
other countries.  The principle imports from the outside world are cotton
goods and notions of various sorts.  In exchange for these, horses, wool,
furs, hides, medicinal herbs, hartshom, musk, and tobacco are exported.
Many of these are brought from Tibet to be exchanged for grain and locally
produced foodstuffs.  Thus, in a sense, the Chinese and Moslems of the
region are the intermediaries in the trade between the Tibetan country and the
outside world.  Salt from Tibet is consumed entirely by the Chinese and
Tibetan market.  There is also a highly profitable, but dangerous, business
in gun-running- firearms of every class and vintage are brought into the Tibetan
country, where they command fancy prices.

In the modern sense of the word, there is no industrialization anywhere
in the area.  There are, of course, districts where specialized types of
handicraft flourish, such as the making of rugs, felts, woolen goods, and linen,
cabinet-working, and smithing, but all these are carried out on a handicraft
basis.

Several distinct cultural groups inhabit the region.  First of all are
the Chinese.  As has been indicated, the Chinese of the region may be
considered as belonging predominantly to the true Chinese stock.  All local
records, as well as archaeological evidence from early historic and bronze
periods back to prehistoric kitchen sites and Neolithic burials, testify to the
continuous Chinese occupation of this region for at least four thousand
years.  In the district of Titao are family graveyards that have a
continuous history of nearly two thousand years.  Thus, whatever aboriginal
admixtures there may be, the people are basically and characteristically Chinese
of the northern type.  The language they speak somewhat resembles Pekinese,
but the occasional use of the fifth tone and some other features of
pronunciation indicate relationship with the Sze-chuanese dialect.  Dr. Hu
Shi, the great authority on the- "national language' of China, said of my
Chinese that it belonged to the most widely distributed dialect in China.
Because of this linguistic affiliation, the people of the region properly
constitute an Integral part of the great Chinese people-a proud, conservative,
Industrious, frugal, and enduring race.

Religiously these Chinese adhere in general to the so-called 'Three Great
Religions," tolerantly making Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in varying
proportions, part of their religious system.  In regions such as the
above-mentioned Titao district, where in history and culture the people go back
to the main line of the Chinese and where scholarship and tradition have
strengthened the cult of ancestor worship and the ideals and practises of
Confucianism, this system predominates in the religious complex of the local
inhabitants.  In the border communities, where the influence of the nearby
Tibetans is strong, the Chinese include a greater amount of Buddhistic
observance and practise in their religious activities.  Despite their
persistence in styling themselves members of the "great sect"-i.e.,
Confucianism- they devote their time and money, in religious matters, to the
performance of Buddhistic ritual.  The Chinese of such areas are
appreciably more religious than those of the more typically Chinese
communities.  Taoism is sandwiched into this all-embracing system of
magical practises, necromancy, and whatever other aberrant forms of philosophy
or superstition might spring up.  Though subscribing to all three of these
religions in varying proportions, the Chinese as a whole seem rather
materialistic; nowhere among them is to be found the religious fervor and
devotion which characterize both the Moslems and the Tibetans of this part of
Asia.

The Chinese-speaking Moslems constitute a racial group quite distinct from
the Chinese, although they share with them a sort of joint occupancy of a good
part of the Kansu and Ching-hai provinces.  They are the descendants of the
Ta-shi, or Arab mercenaries, that from the eighth century or there-abouts began
to march through the events of Chinese history.  As far as we know, those
mercenaries did not bring wives with them and so later took Chinese wives.
Since that time successive intermarriages have diluted the Semitic strain, which
is nevertheless evident to the close observer.  Many of them have a
brownish or even ruddy cast to their beards, their faces are identifiably
Semitic in outline, and nine times out of ten they can be distinguished from the
Chinese even when they are not wearing any distinctive article of apparel.

They differ from the Chinese in character and general traits to an even more
noticeable degree.  In houses, dress, manner of living, and in
modifications most of the Chinese practises, and in language they are quite
indistinguishable from the Chinese.  Yet with all these borrowings, they
are characteristically different.  It is difficult to define that
difference in its totality- perhaps it is best illustrated by the fact that
occupationally they have a special leaning toward vocations that require
superior hardihood and courage, and that in trade they outwit even the astute
Chinese.  By certain faint idiosyncrasies of pronunciation they can
sometimes be identified as Moslems, but only by the use of religious terms taken
from Arabic and by the use of Semitic first names (pronounced with Chinese
inflection) are they linguistically set apart.  By far the greater number
of them have as a surname the syllable "Ma," which is the Chinese rendering of
the first syllable of the name Mohammed.  It is interesting to note, also,
that this syllable in the termination of a village name identifies the village
as Moslem.

In religion they belong to Islam.  They would not measure up to Wahabi
standards, but compared to Moslems in some other parts of the world- notably the
island world- they are strict and punctilious in matters of orthodox observance,
notwithstanding the fact that they are divided into a number of sects, marked by
bitter enmities and feuds.

The third great racial division to be considered comprises the Tibetans of
the region.  By all criteria of physical anthropology the Tibetans of
northeastern Tibet are hard to classify.  We can safely discount statements
that they are descended from the ancient Goths; they unquestionably belong to
the mongoloid division of the human race, but within that broad classification
they seem to be considerably mixed.  Lacking concise anthropological
measurements, we can only make generalizations based on appearance.  Even
so, we find a wide range of types.  In skin color some individuals, beneath
the accumulated suntan, soot, and grease, are lighter-- less a true yellow--
than the Chinese.  Others seem more ruddy or brownish.  They are
somewhat larger in build than the Chinese of northwestern China, who themselves
are of the large northern type.  Some have typically Mongolian faces, but
others have the aquiline features and peculiar look about the eyes which we have
come to associate with some North American Indians.  Even as to hair and
eyes there is a great deal of variation: some have the light brown eyes seen in
certain Tartar types, and some have black eyes, but the so-called Oriental slant
is infrequent: straight black hair predominates, yet curly, or even kinky, hair
is to be found, sometimes in combination with Negroid features.  Any one
seeking to establish a basic type through measurements would find the situation
exceedingly complex, for these Tibetans, whether nomadic or sedentary, present
all the characteristics of a mongrel physical type.  They are not nearly so
homogeneous as the Chinese of the area.

All this agrees with what little historical information we have for the
region.  Certainly during the time of the Mongol dynasties of China there
was a notable dominance of Mongol peoples here.  Many tribes whose language
is now Tibetan are known as Mongols, and there are also some tribes so
designated who still speak Mongolian.  Previous to the period of Mongol
dominance, the mysterious Hor kingdom and people were in the ascendancy; the
Tangut kingdom on the north and the Chiang peoples to the southeast made their
contributions to the Tibetan population of the present day.  And finally,
as recently as five hundred years ago, came Tibetans from Lhasa and Central
Tibet, whose descendants are still to be distinguished from the others in
language, tradition of dress, and even physical type.

Yet this mixture and whatever other divergent strains there may be are welded
into a fairly distinct unit by the use of a common language and the observance
of a common religion.  While religion and language may be two distinct
aspects of culture, in the culture complex of the Tibetan, these two aspects are
very closely linked.  It was Buddhist missionaries who, in the seventh
century, intent upon providing a means of disseminating and perpetuating their
religion, reduced the Tibetan language to writing; and it was Buddhism which,
with many interpolations and modifications, the Tibetans finally accepted as
their religion.  Both language and religion are common to all Tibet.
The language of northeastern Tibet can be understood in Lhasa and on the Indian
border.  Speaking the dialect of the nomads of northeast Tibet, I have yet
been able to talk with monks from Tashi lumpo or pilgrims from Ladak, far off in
the western comer of the land.  There are differences in pronunciation and
structure, of course, and when we come to consider some of the differences in
dialects in the region of the Kansu-Tibetan border we will have to take into
account the differences between those dialects and the Lhasa dialect, as well as
between the language spoken today and its form at the time of its reduction to
writing.  The brother of the Panchen Lama assured me that the nomad dialect
of northeast Tibet was closer to the original language than any other dialect
existing at the present time.

The fact that the language has had a written form and a literature for over a
thousand years has frequently led to the mistaken assumption that Tibetan
culture must be advanced far beyond the primitive folk stage. Yet a written
language and the development of a literature are no more an indication of
civilization than are the literacy and the literary attainments in the case of
certain African tribes that have been taught to read and write their own
languages by missionaries.  Certainly, by no criteria have the people of
northeastern Tibet an indigenous culture more advanced than the tribal cultures
of the nomadic and sedentary tribes of North American Indians.

The form of Buddhism held by the Tibetans is a comparatively corrupt form,
known as Lamaism, or northern Buddhism.  Not only has it taken unto itself
many of the animistic or shamanistic practises of the early Bon religion of
Tibet, setting up an extensive pantheon of gods and demons as an integral part
of the system, but it still admits of distinct sorcerer sects, which are linked
with the orthodox, or Yellow, sect as a part of the religious
organization.  These sorcerer sects have a non-celibate priesthood and a
ritual which is entirely different from the Buddhist ritual; yet they are not
only tolerated but revered as a part of the "true belief." This ability to
harmonize or integrate utterly incompatible and mutually antagonistic beliefs
and practises runs all through Tibetan life.

First we see how the conflict between the dietary tenets of Buddhism and the
exigencies of a pastoral, meat-eating existence is resolved.  Buddhism
forbids the killing of animals for meat, and the Tibetan accepts this
theoretically; but he continues to kill sheep and cattle for meat and rejoices
in the delights of the chase.  So, also, in the matter of sexual
intercourse; the Tibetans practise more license than most people,
notwithstanding an interdiction stronger than in most religions.  Neither
does the Tibetan see anything incongruous in whirling a prayer wheel and saying
his prayers as he rides to rob and kill.

Similar irregularities are apparent in the control-devices and organization
of Tibetan life. The effective unit of organization is the village, or, among
the nomads, the encampment.  Encampments and villages are organized into
tribes for the purposes of defense and the effective maintenance of land
rights.  Sometimes the tribe has no chief, in which case all matters are
settled by the council of old men; at other times, there is a hereditary
chief.  This chief may exercise control of the tribe in conjunction with
the tribal council of old men, or he may even be nominally autocratic (such
autocracy, however, is always strictly qualified by public opinion).  These
tribes are in some cases united in confederacies; one or two groups are really
little states, or kingdoms, and are called such by the Tibetans.  The
Political structure, thus, would seem to be fairly complete; nevertheless, along
with all tribal government there is a quasi-rule by the Living Buddhas, or
lamas, and by the great ecclesiastical establishments, or lamaseries.  In
some instances, the lamasery may represent merely a separate unit within the
scheme of tribal organization, but a unit which by general agreement is allowed
to run its own affairs without interference from the outside.  Then, again,
the lamasery and tribal authority may parallel, or even be competing.
Finally, there are large areas where the tribal organization either has ceased
to exist or never did exist; here the lamasery authority is supreme.
Strictly speaking, the lamaseries should be interested only in matters of
religion and things of the other world; but in view of the fact in Lhasa is an
ecclesiastical hierarchy, it is small wonder that the lamaseries are powerful in
northeastern Tibet.  The wonder is, indeed, that they have not superseded
tribal authority entirely.

Aside from all these interesting and diverse aspects of organization, the
most outstanding aspect of Tibetan life from the standpoint of the study of
culture contacts is the absolute division, on the basis of occupation or
subsistence economy, that cuts across state, tribe, clan and even family,
separating the people in interests, traits, and even in dialect.  Together
with factors of location, etc., it makes of the Tibetans of the northeast two
distinct groups: the sedentary, or faming, peoples of the low valley bottoms and
the nomadic, or pastoral, peoples of the grassy steppes.  This difference
is so great that the cultural relationship between the nomadic and sedentary
peoples may be considered as a problem of culture contact quite as clearly
defined as, and in some respects more interesting than, the problem of culture
contact between peoples of different race.

In addition to these three large racial divisions of Chinese, Chinese
speaking Moslems, and Tibetans, there are a number of other racial and
linguistic units to be found in this region. The scope of this paper is limited
to a discussion of only the most important aspects of culture contact among the
larger groups; but it will be proper to mention briefly the composition and
character of these lesser groups.

Around the city of Hsuin-hwa, on the Yellow River, there is an extensive
population of a Tarki-speaking people, who in the thirteenth century migrated to
this region from Samarkand.  They stand apart from the Chinese not only in
race but in religion-in which they are fanatical followers of Islam.  Only
the more traveled of them speak Chinese, and in their way of life- they are as
different from those around them as though they still lived in far-away
Samarkand.  The current tradition of their migration is an interesting
one.  They were, it seems, a turbulent and horse-thieving lot, who were
eventually forced to emigrate by indignant and victorious neighbors.  With
only a bag of earth and a white camel to carry their leader, they set out to
find a home wherever the soil might correspond to the sample in the bag.
As they camped one night- where they now make their home, the camel died, and in
the morning they found that the earth of the place was like that which they had
carried from Samarkand.  If you don't believe the story, they will show you
the white camel, which very conveniently turned to stone.  Near them, in
another valley, are a number of villages of Tibetans who speak Tibetan but are
Moslem in religion.  There are villages of Mongolian farmers, a peculiar
group whose language is a strange form of archaic Chinese (they claim their
ancestors came to the region in the later Han about 200 A.D.), and still other
groups who are called simply in the Peh Ling range, southwest of Titao,
inhabited by another group of aborigines numbering some thousand families, whose
language has been neither recorded nor identified.

Finally, there are the Tung Hsiang Huei Huei, who inhabit the extensive loess
plateau found within the triangle made by the influence of the Tao and the
yellow rivers.  According to official Chinese estimates they number about
two hundred thousand.  They speak Mongolian, are Moslem in religion, and
are the descendents of the Ouigour Tartars who filled the pages of Chinese
history with great deeds during the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries.

With these the list of distinct ethnic groups to be found in the area of our
investigation is virtually complete.  In certain of the districts now
called Chinese, however, there still remain many traces of aboriginal admixture
of race and culture. Only so can we account for the great variations of facial
form and pronunciation found in the Fu-Chiang district or for the peculiarities
of the people of the Kai Chow district.

From this long list of ethnic groups only four will be considered.
Instead of dealing comprehensively with the many combinations of culture
contacts existing among those four groups, I am arbitrarily limiting the
discussion to four aspects of cultural interaction which are not only the most
important ones but differ sharply in kind and degree.  They are as
follows:

(1)        The Chinese and the
Chinese-speaking Moslems (descendants of the Arabs)

(2)        The Chinese and the Sedentary
Tibetans

(3)        The Moslems and the Nomadic
Tibetans

(4)        The Nomadic and the Sedentary
Tibetans

These relationships can be graphically indicated as a rectangle, with the
four groups at the four corners and the relationships indicated by the lines
which form the sides.

Chinese

Moslems

Sedentary

Nomadic

Tibetans

Tibetans

The labeling of the lines connecting the four groups- in other words, the
classifying of the kind and degree of contact- may be left until the facts have
been properly described in the body of this paper.

II. THE CHINESE AND THE CHINESE-SPEAKING MOSLEMS

The first aspect of culture contact to be described is that between the
Chinese and the Chinese-speaking Moslems.  The particular communities which
I have in mind are located in the Titao and the Hochow districts.  The city
of Titao is strictly Chinese, but, although no Moslems are allowed to reside
within the city gates, there are many Moslem communities and individuals within
the district.  Hochow consists of two parts: the city, which is Chinese,
and the southern suburb, which is entirely Moslem.  This suburb is called
the Mecca of China; filled with mosques, shrines, and Islamic schools, it well
deserves the title.  In these two districts are represented virtually all
the manifestations of Moslem-Moslem contact as it occurs throughout the
provinces of Kansu, Chinghai, and Ninghsia.

As has been indicated, this area is largely within the fertile loess region,
where productivity is being seriously threatened by a diminishing
rainfall.  That threat is being minimized to some extent, however, by
increased irrigation.  Thus the area is typical of the farming economy
that is found all the way across the northern half of China.  The crops are
the same, and the manner of life is similar.

Not only is the general climatic background the same for both these groups,
but the local unit of organization is identical.  Although both are
primarily agricultural peoples, they do not live in isolated farmhouses,
nor does the individual proprietor live in the midst of his own fields.
For the sake of protection and in accordance with a tradition of settlement that
is continent-wide and probably older than history, the farmers are gathered in
villages.  When some peculiar suitability, such as location on a
well-traveled road, makes a village acceptable to an entire district as a market
town, it may grow to the proportions of a city.  A typical faming village
supports between twenty and thirty families.  Whenever the population
grows so large that those whose fields lie on the periphery can no longer
go back and forth each day, the village begins to break up, those with the very
distant fields becoming the nucleus of a new settlement.

Those closely integrated units, whether Moslem or Chinese, are alike not only
as to spatial characteristics but as to their function in the social
organization.  The counties may be administratively divided into
districts, "roads," or "directions," but the basic unit of control is the
ad-man who is largely responsible for the maintenance of law and order and for
the carrying out of government regulations.  The larger villages may have
their own "family protective associations" and organized units of the militia,
but even the smaller ones that have no such organizations are recognized by the
county administration as autonomous units.

The Chinese and Moslems living in the same general population pattern seem
superficially to have much in common.  In the first place, they use the
same language (the Moslems have brought into usage among themselves a large
number of Arabic names, but they are pronounced with a Chinese
inflection).  In districts where Moslems and Chinese share a dialect,
it is asserted by some that Moslems and Chinese can be distinguished by certain
differences in pronunciation; I have never been able to make such
distinctions in the dark, although when hearing was reinforced by sight, I
too fancied that there were minute differences.  Among themselves the
Moslems use many religious words that are taken directly from the Koran,
but such words are also given a Chinese twist.  They wear much the same
clothing as the Chinese, but with, of course, certain mannerisms and preferences
in dress (such as, among the womenfolk, the wearing of a hood and sometimes a
partial veil) which are sufficient to make them distinguishable in a crowd.

With language and dress the list of similarities ends.  Racially, in
spite of adulteration of the Semitic strain for generations and a fairly large
number of proselytes, they can be distinguished at sight.  Some are very
like the Chinese, but at the other end of the scale are those who by their
strongly Semitic features, and heavy beards, sometimes with degrees of brown or
red in them, could never by any stretch of imagination be confused with the
Chinese.  Beyond the matter of physical traits, they display many features
of character and disposition that mark them as being nonChinese.  The
Chinese of the region truly and typically belong to the northern Chinese group
and by every factor of heredity and a shared history of four thousand years are
fully Chinese.

In religion the Moslems belong to Islam, and the Chinese are ancestor and
idol worshipers.  Both have uncomfortable and distressing histories, and
thoughtful members of each group are giving anxious thought to the
implications of their heritage.  Traditionally the Chinese have always
been dominant in general politics, but they have hardly known what to do with
the high-spirited, restive, and turbulent Moslems who were always a defiant
minority, impossible to assimilate.  Even if all other chasms might have
been bridged by tactful treatment (of which there has been little except when
the Chinese were scared by the threat of an impending Mohammedan
rebellion), there would still remain the uncompromising creed of Allah to
threaten the Chinese with death and destruction in the name of the All
Merciful.

Yet the ground on which these incompatible factions or groups must meet is
that of a common subsistence economy.  As the village is the unit of
organization common to Moslems and Chinese alike, so are they both predominantly
farmers, of the small land-owning peasant type, and follow the same seasonal
routine.

Their yearly routine exhibits the characteristic common of all farming
operation, namely, that seasons of comparative leisure alternate with periods of
great activity.  Yet the work of preparing the ground, sowing, cultivating,
harvesting, and threshing the crop is more evenly distributed throughout the
year than in many regions.  In the dead of winter little can be done beyond
collecting all the sewage and barnyard droppings for use as fertilizer, but
farming operations are begun early in the spring with the carting of both
fertilizer and blocks of ice to the fields.  The general openness of the
winters makes it possible to do this very early in February, and with the first
softening of the ground plowing is started.  Plowing and seeding is man's
work among the Chinese and Moslem farmers, but when the grain is up two or three
inches the fields are cultivated and weeded by all the members of the family,
who spread out across the field in as long a line as their numbers will allow
and work on hands and knees.  Every member of the family is also employed
during the harvest.  Threshing and final winnowing of the grain rarely
takes place until early winter, which brings the end of one season's activity
very close to the beginning of the next season.  The grain is the main
source of wealth.  After the year's supply of food and seed-grain has beer,
set aside, the surplus is sold to the urban population.  The amount that
can be sold determines how much cloth and cotton wadding can be bought for
clothes and how many of the extras of life may be enjoyed.  Some of the
farmers supplement their income by selling wood, which they cut and carry, into
the city either on their own backs or on the backs of such donkeys or horses as
they have.  Sometimes, also, they burn and sell charcoal or peddle
fodder.

These peasant farmers have very little in the way of livestock beyond a few
sheep, most of which are needed for working the farm. The only exception to this
is the pig or two which the Chinese fatten for the New Year festivities. From
the wool of the sheep they make felt and felt socks and a coarse homemade cloth.
The thread fort the cloth is spun by hand by the members of the family, and the
weaving is done by certain farmers who carry their portable looms around from
community to community and hire themselves out. The food of the peasant is the
very coarsest, and he had but scant protection against the rigors of the
climate; yet he feels that with his home and a regular yield from his fields
there is little else he needs. Brushwood provides him with more firewood than
the city dweller can generally afford.  The stable droppings and the dried
leaves and chaff which he gathers assures him of at least a hot kang on
which to sleep (the kang is a sort of hollow platform made of dried mud
and is heated from beneath by smudge fires). The days are not unpleasant; he can
while away the hours just standing around in the winter sunshine, or he can
inject a little adventure into his life by going to town with grain, fodder, or
firewood, and perhaps bringing back with him something he was able to buy in the
market.

Occasionally the Chinese and Moslem populations are found living
together within the same communal unit, but more frequently they maintain
separate villages, which alternate in an irregular pattern throughout the
district.  Some districts are predominantly Chinese, others are
Moslem.  There is a greater degree of mixture to the population wherever
the villages have progressed in size beyond the farm hamlet and have become
towns, because the resultant diversity of occupation has made possible some
divisions of callings or vocations.  In such a community, we find a
tendency on the part of the Moslems to follow the more adventurous of the
subsidiary callings, or those which require more hardihood and daring.
Such occupations as innkeeper, trader, muleteer, carter, soldier, and the like
attract many more Moslems, proportionately, than Chinese.

Trade in this part of northwestern China is still very much what it was in
the days of the Marchaunt Adventurers.  By their willingness to dare the
uncertainties of a form of trade that is not only affected by all the vagaries
of the markets but is exposed to possible seizures by the military and
depredations by bandits and footpads, the Moslems have made themselves the
outstanding traders of the region.  They are undaunted by the hardship
of primitive travel and the risks of new situations and unknown
roads.  Traveling in Tibet, their expeditions often have a semi-military
aspect, and in Chinese areas of warfare and lawlessness they must sometimes face
the risk of prison or at least confiscation of their goods.

The life of the muleteer or carter is even more difficult.  At times
they must be awake all night long and at dawn be on the road to walk for thirty
or forty miles before nightfall. They get but little rest in the inn, for they
must feed and care for the animals and tend to the repair of saddles and gear.
They are always in fear that some untoward circumstance will intervene to wipe
out their chances of a livelihood. The best of such interruptions is that of
being commandeered by the civil authorities to carry persons or goods. In such
case there is a fair hope of finishing the task and going again about their own
business; and, if the matter is not too urgent, money in a few palms may make it
possible to escape the task. If, on the other hand, they are commandeered by the
military, it may be weeks and even months before they are finally permitted to
go, and they will have worn out themselves and their animals in return for a
mere subsistence allowance.  Frequently their animals are commandeered
outright; then the chances of getting them back are slim indeed. Finally, they
may meet bandits, either Chinese or Moslems, as they travel; in which case, the
traces are cut or the loads tossed to one side, and the bandits ride off on
their new mounts.  I have seen an entire squadron of Mohammedan rebel
cavalry going into action with nothing but pack mules and cart horses for
mounts.

Innkeeping is also an adventurous calling. Compared with the profits from
faming or handicrafts in a village community, those from keeping an inn are
large (providing there are no major setbacks), but the risks are great.  If
bandits come, the innkeeper must serve them or his inn will be wrecked; should
the soldiers arrive, they will quickly make him regret his entertainment of the
bandits- and order some for themselves.  In either case he gets little or
nothing for all he purveys.  Indeed, the bandits are more likely to offer
payment, but it is usually some stolen goods that he dare not accept.  So
may the unwelcome guests of a single night carry off the profits of a month.

Lastly, it is as soldiers that the Moslems excel.  Even before the
current war in China it was true that every corporal might have a marshal's
baton in his knapsack.  The present governor of the province of Chinghai
was first a carter in the transport service of an army, then a private, and now
governor.  The Moslems make first-rate soldiers.  In difficult places
Moslem troops are supported by a sort of religious frenzy.  I have seen
them fighting the Tibetans, and I have seen them fighting the Chinese; once,
when I was being held prisoner by them, I saw about two thousand fight their way
out of a trap formed by six times as many Chinese regulars, taking machine gun
nests and making a way through by sheer courage and superior daring.  It is
interesting to note that the last general to stand against the Japanese in
Manchuria, in 1931, was the Moslem Ma-chan-san; and that at the present time
(1988) Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek's second-in-command is the Moslem Pai
Chong Hsi, who shares honors in the dispatches from the front with yet another
Moslem general Li Tsun Ren.

The Chinese, on the other hand, tend to monopolize the handicraft
occupations. They make the best carpenters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, masons,
and tailors. There is one exception to this general rule, namely the preparation
and making up of furs, which is in the hands of Moslems- probably because the
handling of sheep and lambskins was closely associated with the butchering-trade
which, except for pork, is Moslem. The Chinese show greater aptitude, or at
least greater preference, for the scholarly callings; they are the school
teachers, accountants (even in Moslem firms), doctors, engineers, and
administrative officials in the civil service.

Instances occur of what might be called a division of labor or a highly
satisfactory cooperation between Moslem enterprise and Chinese skill. Not many
years ago in Taochow Old City there was an extensive industry of casting brazen
pots and kettles for the Tibetan trade.  The metal used was that of the old
coinage of China- the time-honored square-holed coin that is now out of
date.  This coinage was brought up and transported by small Moslem
trader-muleteers and then sold to the Chinese artisans, who did the casting. The
finished product was again sold to the Moslems, who took it into the Tibetan
country as an article of trade.  Thus by their enterprise the Moslems found
a market for the product of Chinese skill which kept the foundry fires going a
good part of the year.  The last Mohammedan rebellion, in 1929--1930,
and the consequent depopulation and enmity interrupted this cooperative effort
for a number of years, but the venture has recently been revived.

Thus, in the callings that may be incidental to the basic pursuits of the
village or in those adventitious callings that may take a man away from the
village and into the larger urban organization, there is possible a division of
interest and activity, based, one may believe, on preferences or natural
gifts.  But in the basic occupation of the village- the production of food
for the people of both the village and the city (which may or may not have a
share in that basic occupation)- there may be either communal cooperation or a
rivalry of sufficient intensity to eliminate or segregate one of the
parties.  This is unquestionably the situation that exists between the
Moslem and the Chinese.

It is clear that the Moslems and Chinese have not chosen the way of tolerant
cooperation.  I know of no strictly farming village where there is an equal
mixture of the two groups; in every case the village is predominantly one
or the other.  In some instances, the population is composed almost
entirely of one group, with only a few hangers-on of the other.  In the
Hochow district such division of villages is very marked.  On one occasion
we made a trip with Moslem muleteers.  They were friendly and suggested
that we stay with them in their village, so for that night we stopped in a
little Moslem world. The children were called I-si-mer (4-1-3, Ismael) Fa-ti-mai
(3-1-3, Fatima) Er-pu-tu (4-1-4, Abdul) [the numerals indicate the tones which
were assigned to the syllables of a non-tonal language in rendering them into
Chinese]. It was the fast of Ramadan (or feast, if you think of it in terms of
night), and the fires blazed all night, and people called and shouted. Before
darkness fell, pious bearded men said their evening prayers in public places;
one, who wore a white turban as a sign that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca,
argued points of theology, quoting the Koran in oddly mutilated Arabic. The
Moslems referred to themselves as "we" (being careful never to use the inclusive
"we," which would include those spoken to) and to the Chinese in the near-by
villages as "they." The village had a small building that did duty for a mosque,
where the children were gathered at regular periods to receive instruction in
Islam and learn the Arabic alphabet and phonetics so that they would be able to
read the sounds of necessary prayers and religious formulas even if they
couldn't understand them.  Some of them went also to the government school,
to which a teacher came daily from a neighboring town.

We made another trip over the same general route but on this occasion had
Chinese muleteers.  We kept a lookout for the Moslem village but missed it
nevertheless; inquiry brought out that we had been taken around it.
Somehow the landscape seemed to have a much more typically Chinese
complexion than before.  Again we stayed for the night in the native
village of our muleteers.  The homes were plastered with newly-posted
kitchen and door gods.  The local shrine, or temple, stood at the
crossroads, with a platform over it for the performance of plays, and the smell
of incense was in the air as it is at New Year's time.  Pigs grunted in the
courtyards and in the streets; after dark, accompanied by the beating of gongs
and the clashing of cymbals, effigies and masks were carried around in
celebration of some aspect of pagan worship.  When the people said "we"-
and sometimes, with greater tolerance than the Moslems, they included us- they
referred to themselves and also to Chinese in general; "they" meant the others,
who were defined with some hesitancy as the Moslems who lived in other villages
around.

These two villages- one very near the other- were very clear-cut
examples of the pattern of segregation to be expected.  They were
strictly farming communities- there wasn't even an inn in either of them.
In a larger community, where there are a shop or two, a blacksmith
establishment, and a few inns, one may encounter a Moslem innkeeper in a Chinese
village or a Chinese blacksmith in a Moslem village.  The Moslem inn, with
its shingle bearing the sign of a teapot, enjoys not only the exclusive
patronage of their own people, who may not eat food prepared by others, but that
of quite a large number of Chinese as well, for these inns are clean and the
food is tasty.  Thus, in communities of mixed population the Moslems tend
to monopolize the restaurant business.

A number of factors can be cited to account for the pattern of
segregation in the population distribution.  As we shall see later,
the Chinese have a higher population gain, and the Moslems are economically more
successful, both of which facts may be sources of jealousy.  But
factors related to religious habits and ideals appear to have a determining
effect in keeping the two peoples apart.

To state categorically that the Chinese are rather materialistic in their
outlook does not do away with the fact that Chinese religious observance and, in
particular, their conscientiousness in carrying out the ritual connected with
ancestor worship and veneration of the past occupy a large place in Chinese
communal life.  At stated times throughout the year- especially at the New
Year, and during the second, fifth, and eighth moons- festivals honoring certain
deities or commemorating religious events are held.  Such a festival is
always a communal matter: all contribute money for the furnishing of trappings
proper to the affair, some are concerned with organizing the celebration, others
carry the images in the procession, and still others collaborate with the
priests- Buddhist or Taoist, as the case may be- in the performance of the
various ceremonies.  Such religious festivals are not altogether a matter
of the calendar, for additional celebrations are often held in times of drought
or other community disaster.

Another aspect of communal worship is to be found in the village or community
theatricals.  Although the plays given are generally straight drama (most
of them are historical) and not at all like the miracle plays or so-called
"devil dances" of the Tibetans, the primary significance in the presentation is
a religious one- to give the gods pleasure and thus dispose them favorably to
the people of the community.  Even the masking and the animal plays of the
New Year's celebration have a definitely religious significance.  That the
plays are presented for the pleasure of the gods does not detract, of course,
from the enjoyment of the people themselves.

The local temple or shrine is also a matter of community effort.
Regular assessments are levied for the propitiation of the local deity, who is
often styled "earth god" and is represented as having a very particular interest
in the locality- cannot, in fact, leave unless his idol is carried.  During
times of drought he may be taken out on a tour of the fields to see the extent
of the damage; if he proves obdurate and persists in refusing the needed
downpour, he is left for hours in the burning sun so that personal
discomfort may add its urgings to the prayers of the people.  His home and
its upkeep is a sort of public charge, that is not mandatory by law but is a
matter equally of public opinion and personal faith.  At times the entire
population will turn out to rebuild a wall or renew a roof of the local
temple.

Such idolatry many Chinese might consider an aberration and a cause for
embarrassment.  In truth, it is not strictly in line with the unifying
factor of Chinese culture, which may be defined in a three-fold manner as the
recognition, veneration, and perpetuation of the tie with the past.  The
essential religious activity of pure Confucianism- the worship of the
spirits of ancestors- is an integral part of Chinese culture.  We think of
a funeral as a strictly family matter, but in a small Chinese hamlet is very
much a community affair.  Virtually everyone has a part in the mourning,
feasting, burying, and attendant religious activities.  Then, too, every
year during the feast of Ching Ming, in the early spring, the Chinese decorate
the graves, make various of offerings of food and drink, and burn paper

money and incense, and bewail the dead.  The graveyards are not
necessarily communal, but as Ching Ming is universally observed no one can
abstain from participation without arousing comment and a certain degree of
reproach; on the other hand, prompt observance of the rites creates at least a
feeling of fellowship.  Of course, it is primarily a personal matter;
nevertheless, the entire community responds, just as in the case of the spring
planting and for the same reason; the comradeship each finds in working
with the others in whatever concerns the welfare of the community.

These communal activities, for all their religious significance, play a large
part in creating a community consciousness.  The Moslems in the same
community the festivals, theatricals, and temple-building and repair are
offensive as being part of "idol worship"; nevertheless in some subtle way, they
find cause for resentment in being excluded.  They, also, have their
special religious observances, some of which are of a communal nature, although
Islam is essentially an individualistic religion.  First of these is the
month-long feast of Ramadan.  As no good Moslem either eats or drinks from
dawn to dark during that month, in a strictly Moslem community food disappears
from sight during the daylight hours.  In a mixed community, when Ramadan
coincides with the general feasting and gaiety of the Chinese New Year, the
behavior of each group is an offense and aggravation to the other.
Neighborhood quarrels and street fights may ensue, and even when there is no
open break there is much covert ill-will as a result.  But if the Moslems
have to match the New Year's feasting of the Chinese with long-faced
abstinence during the day, they manage to crowd the hours of darkness with
great feasting and good fellowship of their own.

The building and upkeep of the mosque is also, as in the case of the Chinese
temple, a communal matter.  Again assessments are made, and
cooperative effort is initiated; and, of course, as a project it rivals and
competes with the Chinese temple. The whole business is a fruitful source of
trouble, often ending in lawsuits and boycotts, between the two factions of the
community.

The burial customs of the two groups differ widely. The Chinese busy their
dead in coffins- costly out of all proportion to the simple scale of Chinese
peasant life, for the coffin has come to be a symbol of filial piety. For years
before it is finally called into use the contemplation of the sturdy timbers of
his final narrow bed brings joy and comfort to the grandfather and grandmother
of the family. The Moslems have fiercely resisted the use of the coffin,
probably because of what they conceive to be idolatrous connotations. Their dead
are wrapped in cloths after the manner of mummies. The grave is dug straight
down into the ground, and at a sufficient depth a shelf is hollowed out on one
side, making in effect an artificial cave; the body is laid on this shelf. To
the Chinese the Moslems are savages, who bury their dead like dogs.

Each group has its own graveyard, which among the Moslems is more a community
project than among the Chinese, who are likely to have a system of family lots.
The Moslems take great pains to make their graveyards like parks or semi-public
groves, which become places for informal religious meditation and acquire a
peculiar odor of sanctity.  Among the Chinese the graveyards are open, and
there is no prejudice against allowing sheep or cattle to graze over them- in
fact, they are in a way community pastures.  But the carefully kept Moslem
graveyards are generally closed to such purposes, and should cattle or sheep get
in there is further cause for friction.

In matters of religious or semi-religious import the trouble-producing
dissimilarities between Moslems and Chinese thus range from issues of a strictly
religious nature to those of veneration and custom, and even to things which to
us seem ludicrous.  There is, for example, the matter of pigs.  Pork
is the chief meat of the Chinese, and the average village in western China has
pigs in the streets or roads and pigs in the courtyards and squares.
Whatever food shops or butcher-shops the hamlet may boast will have sections
displaying raw or cooked pig.  The New Year's pig is to the Chinese what
the Thanksgiving turkey is to the Americans.  Item by item this story of
the pig is one long and continuous aggravation to the pious Moslem, for whom the
pig pollutes the air and defiles the ground.

The Moslems on the other hand specialize in beef and thereby violate one of
the mores of the Chinese.  The cow is not sacred, as it is in India, but as
the symbol of agriculture it is the object of a sort of veneration, especially
where Confucian traditions are strong.  In earlier times, the killing of
cattle was under interdict as a generally recognized crime, and even now the
Chinese butchers leave the killing of beef to the Moslems.  I know many
old-time Confucian scholars who have just as great a horror of eating beef as
the Moslem has of eating pork.

These and many other ramifications of the various sources of friction between
the Chinese and Moslems have brought about an acute state of incompatibility,
manifested in overt violence and covert hate, and have resulted in the
segregation we now find in areas where the two people live.

There have been three Mohammedan rebellions within the last hundred years.
The first and greatest of the three began in the middle of the last century and
lasted for about twelve years. During this time the population of the province
is said to have been reduced from about twelve million to something less than
four million. For a number of years before the end of that rebellion no crops
were planted (although the accidental yield of the fallow fields was furtively
reaped), and men banded together to hunt human beings for food in the same wav
they would hunt game.  There has been one rebellion every thirty years, the
most recent one being that of 1928-1980.  The natives say that the
recurrence of the rebellion waits only for a generation to grow up and
revenge itself on the slayers of its fathers.

These conflicts have always begun over some matter of political
import-oppression, over-taxation, an unjust settlement of some case in the
courts, or even the unwise interference of the government in a sectarian issue
between the Moslems.  Yet one cannot say that these immediate causes were
the fundamental, underlying ones.  Sometimes, it is true, persecution,
harshness, and the generally overbearing attitude of Chinese officials towards
the Moslems have provoked trouble, but more often Moslems and Chinese have
suffered alike under oppression and misgovernment and only the Moslems have had
the hardihood to resort to arms.  However much the war may have been in the
beginning a political one and directed against the government, it has
always degenerated quickly into a holy war of extermination, in which
non-combatants were killed wholesale.  In no instance has
extermination been complete; communities of Chinese in the midst of Moslems
and communities of Moslems in the midst of Chinese have survived.  Yet the
net result has been to encourage segregation, Moslem groups fleeing from
Chinese districts and establishing themselves as war refugees in
predominantly Moslem communities, and the Chinese following the same
course.  The degree of segregation appears to be greater at present than it
was thirty years ago.

Over the course of years, segregation has also been brought about through
less drastic measures.  In the majority of districts- Titao is an example-
the Chinese are numerically and politically dominant and by means of that
dominance are able, through petty persecution, trumped up lawsuits, and the
like, to make it sufficiently uncomfortable for the Moslems that they will
eventually go elsewhere.  The Moslems, in turn, by terrorism and similar
methods, gradually squeeze out a Chinese minority.  This is especially true
of districts like Hochow, where the civil power is held by the Chinese but the
military power is in the hands of the Moslems.  Thus, throughout such
districts, we find a fairly regular alternation of Chinese and Moslem
villages.

All these factors have produced a marked competition for political
power.  As we have pointed out, the rebellions have often been precipitated
by political issues, and in the negotiations for peace which followed (for the
Chinese have never gained an outright victory) there has always been a
maneuvering for more power on the part of the Moslem leaders.  Conditions
along the border, also trouble with the restless, turbulent Tibetan tribes, have
often afforded signal opportunity for the Moslem military leaders. One Moslem
general who was made defense commissioner of the border- marches used that
commission and the activities involved as a springboard to the governorship of a
province- one of the two provinces in northwest China ruled by Moslems.
For a long time repressive measures by the Chinese authorities seemed to be
driving these two provinces into revolt, but more recently a policy aimed
at enlisting Moslem cooperation and Moslem military genius in behalf of the
central government has resulted in greater stability, which gives promise of
increasing as time goes on.

The degree of power which the Moslems have won and maintained has furnished a
promising ground for propaganda.  Back in the days of the World War, agents
preaching pan-Islam did their best to stir up military ambition and foster
military action.  At a later date the Soviet-trained Uzbeks and Kirghiz
worked very hard to get something started among them.  The moment was
opportune, for the Central Government of China was then putting strong pressure
on the Moslems, the Soviet agents backed the wrong horse when rightly or
wrongly, Ma Chong Ing, became identified in the minds of Moslems as the protégé
of Moscow; he had been the leader of the last rebellion (quite definitely the
least successful), but he had alienated the most powerful section of Moslem
influence and power.  When the Communist armies of Central China on their
famous long march approached through Tibetan territory they met fierce
resistance on the part of organized Moslem power, which by that time had been
drawn into cooperation with the Central Government.  The body of
Moslem opinion was behind that cooperation, for the Moslems were thoroughly
alarmed at the anti-religious propaganda of the Communists.

In the meantime, after the Japanese coup in Manchuria the rumor spread among
the Moslems of the northwest that a nephew of Abdul Hamid had been received in
Tokyo and was being backed by the Japanese government.  A determined
effort followed to build up pro-Japanese sentiment under cover of a revived idea
of pan-Islam, with Japan instead of Germany playing the role of defender of the
faithful.  But again fate played into the hands of the Chinese government
when the Moslem general Ka-Chan Shan made himself a national hero by his
die-hard fight against the Japanese.  Not only did the fact that he was a
Moslem present the suspect Moslems to the Central Government in a new
light, but the story of his bravery and the fight he made turned Moslem sympathy
away from the Japanese.  Thus the rise of Moslem military power in the far
northwest of China, growing out of the incompatibilities of two peoples,
constitutes an interesting story in itself and has furnished a field for diverse
international intrigue and plotting.

However much all this may bring into relief the rivalries of the two peoples,
and however much the pattern of population distribution may indicate
definite incompatibilities, there is, nonetheless, a certain amount of shift in
population from one group to the other- chiefly from the Chinese to
Moslem.  Three factors are involved here: the less religious, or at least
more religiously tolerant, Chinese can change his with less of a break than the
Moslem, for whom religion is pretty much a life-and-death matter; in the second
place, the Moslems are on the whole a little better off economically than
the Chinese; and finally the population increase is definitely greater among the
Chinese than among the Moslems.  This last condition is hard to explain; it
may be that the generally greater incidence of monogamy among the Chinese is
responsible; possibly racial differences are the determining factor; or it maybe
that the Chinese philosophy regarding life and the hereafter creates an intense
desire for progeny not present among the Moslems- though, so far as I know,
there is no birth control practised among the latter.  Certainly the facts
are obvious, and anyone going through Moslem and Chinese communities or living
in them is impressed by the comparatively small families of the
Moslems.

Intermarriage is one way in which this shift of population is
accomplished.  In the beginning the Arab mercenaries took Chinese
wives, and their descendants have no prejudice against such a procedure.
Indeed, as far as I have been able to observe, there is in certain instances a
real premium placed on Chinese wives. One Mohammedan official I know of gave
preference to his Chinese wife, for, being a woman of education, she
represented Chinese culture.  Education is now being initiated for
Moslem women, but it has progressed at a faster rate among the Chinese.
There is, of course, a certain reluctance on the part of most Chinese women to
be party to such marriages, for they are not only expected to become Moslem in
religion, but they must forgo all contact with their own people.  Yet even
in peace times, when there is no overt coercion, such marriages do take place;
and of course during the turmoil and upheaval of rebellion a great number of
such marriages occur, being in effect marriages by capture.  On the other
hand, I have never heard of a peacetime marriage between a Moslem woman and a
Chinese man.  Some marriages by capture do take place during disturbed
conditions, but they are generally only temporary, because the Moslem woman
usually runs away when conditions have quieted down.

Proselytizing is another cause of shift- also from Chinese to Moslem for
one of the duties enjoined on the faithful is the winning of proselytes.
When there is peace and conditions are normal, the feared and hated Moslems find
proselytizing a rather slow process, but always there is a gradual addition to
Islam because of the missionary efforts of the followers of the prophet.
Sometimes the convert wants merely to fit into a Moslem community or to
better his economic position, but sometimes also, conversion is affected because
the creed that cries to Allah satisfies a hunger for truth to a degree that the
painted effigies in the temples can not.

The greatest number of proselytes, however, are gained during the
rebellions; when he is confronted with the traditional alternatives of
relinquishing his belief or submitting to the sword, the average Chinese
has no hesitation whatever.  Of course, many such converts leave after the
crisis is past, but a great number remain, for the rite of circumcision gives a
peculiar definiteness to the transition and marks the man so that return to the
Chinese group is doubly hard.  As has been said, most Moslems have as a
surname the syllable "Ma." An inquiry into the history of Moslem families with
other surnames leads me to believe that they were originally Chinese and became
Moslem through various methods of persuasion.  Indeed, the Chinese style
these Moslems of the "odd" surnames "the persuaded Moslems." However that
may be, they seem to be in good standing with their co-religionists (though they
are somewhat less zealous) and are definitely a part of the Moslem group in the
culture complex of the region.

Finally, there is a population shift from the Chinese to the Moslem group
through the adoption of Chinese children by Moslem families.  This fits in
with the difference in birth rate, which has already been noted.  As is the
case with marriage and proselytizing, the greater number are forcible adoptions
during times of rebellion- then children are of ten spared along with the
younger women, and taken as captives to be regularly adopted into Moslem
families and brought up as true children of the home.  At the end of the
rebellion some find their way back to their own families, but by far the greater
number, having adapted themselves to the new conditions of life and found them
on the whole rather pleasant, are willing to stay on.

Though not as impressive numerically, there is also a regular incidence of
peacetime adoptions, largely because of the better economic position of the
Moslems and their greater solidarity.  A famine or some other general
disaster provides opportunity for Moslems to adopt children, both girls and
boys, from refugees and from those Chinese whose margin of subsistence is very
narrow.  But the children of their own poor are taken care of by Moslems,
in order that they may not have to be cared for by any Chinese (although there
is much less chance in that direction) and so lost to Islam.

In spite of the general incompatibility and antagonism between Moslems and
Chinese and the consequent tendency toward segregation in districts where the
two groups are most closely in contact, and in addition to the population shift,
there are also to be discerned certain reciprocal modifications of
character and outlook.  The Chinese living in a region where there are
large numbers of Moslems seem to take on a certain hardihood and daring.
The natives recognize this fact and say that the constant friction brings out
the hardiness of one's makeup.  The Chinese of the Hochow district,
where there is a strong Moslem predominance, are themselves the most successful
soldiers and muleteers- to name two of the more dangerous callings- of all the
Chinese peoples of the province.  On the other hand, a Moslem community in
a region where the influence is overwhelmingly Chinese tends to lose some of its
religious intolerance, and its members manifest a greater leaning toward, and
preference for, scholarship and the so-called learned callings than do those
Moslems who are less subjected to culture pressure from the Chinese.  Such
is outstandingly the case in the community of Hinchow, where the Moslems are
definitely a minority.

In summarizing the culture contact found between the Chinese and the
Chinese-speaking Moslems in China's northwest one can say that here we have two
cultures, differing in race and religion, but having the same regional
distribution, the same subsistence economy, and the same language.  The
barrier erected between the two groups by the deep racial and religious
dissimilarities has been made stronger rather than weaker by their sharing of
the same subsistence economy.  The resulting antagonism has been expressed
in conflict of great intensity, which has led to an increasing degree of
segregation, notwithstanding a certain interchange of population and some
secondary influences.  The two peoples stand opposed, with a tendency to
seek a solution to their mutual problems through political
self-determination.

III.  THE CHINESE AND THE SEDENTARY TIBETANS

The second problem of culture contact with which this paper is concerned
is the infiltration of Chinese into the region occupied by the Tibetan farming
population, many instances of which are found all along the border between the
Chinese and Tibetan country.  In the region of the Koko Nor an extensive
colonization project is in process of development, and the government is putting
all possible pressure behind it.  Land has been preempted from the Tibetan
tribes, with scant regard for their desires, and is being granted to
Chinese colonists.  In still other districts turbulent Tibetan villages
have been brought under strict rule by Chinese authorities, and under the
repressive force of such control the Tibetans have been forced to the
wall.  There are, however, other sections where the Tibetans, aided by
favoring circumstances of terrain, have been able to resist even long-continued
pressure from the Chinese.  The instance we are about to consider falls in
neither of these categories: it is an example of infiltration affected without
benefit of political pressure, the results of which may therefore be ascribed to
cultural causes alone.

It should be noted, first, that the district is located in a sharply defined
geographical area, extending for about seventy miles along the upper course of
the Tao River- from a point about twenty miles above Hinchow to the last of the
villages of the Choni clans, twenty-five miles from Taochow.  Most of those
villages are in the main valley of the Tao River, although a few are to be found
on some of the larger tributaries to the south.  For part of the distance
the river forms the boundary between Chinese and Tibetan villages; then Tibetan
villages appear on both sides of the stream, though Chinese influence
predominates on the northern bank for some distance.

Little farming is carried on at a height above 10,000 feet, and the riverside
level of this area is from 8,000 to 9,000 feet above sea level.  The
elevation, combined with the close proximity to forested mountains of
considerable height, insures a fairly regular and adequate rainfall- indeed,
some years the problem is not lack of rain but too much of it. The growing
season is quite short, and the principal crops are barley, soybeans, peas and
even some wheat.  The soil is definitely not so fertile as in the
characteristic loess region and requires not only barnyard composite but
sometimes special burnings of sod to make it productive.  Even then
the yield is far below that of the Titao and Hochow districts.

On the other hand, the extensive forest and the good grating slopes furnish
the inhabitants with two kinds of supplementary activity.  By means of
lumbering and charcoal-burning the forests are exploited to supplement the yield
of the fields, and the available pasture has stimulated the keeping of livestock
to an appreciably greater extent than in typical Chinese farming country.

As one follows the river upstream, there is a gradual but definite change in
the physical characteristics of the region.  The pockets of the loess
formation found within the protecting contours of steep hills become infrequent,
the forests that stand or hang on the shady slopes become increasingly
dense and valuable, and the soil becomes progressively poorer.  There is a
steady gain in altitude in the valley floor of about one thousand feet in
the seventy miles, with an accompanying change in the methods and schedule of
agriculture.  The terracing so characteristic of a Chinese landscape
decreases, and more and more the fields are found only on the differing levels
or natural terraces of the valley floor.

Following the river up this steadily changing valley, we pass from one
clearly defined culture pattern to another, progressing through all the
intermediate stages in the successive villages.  Thus, a trip of seventy or
eighty miles takes one through a veritable laboratory of cultural change, with
every step labeled and illustrated.  In the first village Chinese
culture is dominant, and there are only vague traces of Tibetan influence;
as one moves on, Tibetan influence increases to a point where the two cultures
are evenly balanced; and from there on Chinese influence decreases until in the
farthest villages the Tibetan aspect of life and manners is virtually
unadulterated.

Such a trip likewise recalls a certain sequence of events that makes it
almost a journey into the past; for, leaving the first village, which is Chinese
in almost everything but its name (even that is pronounced with a Chinese
inflection and tones), one leaves, in a sense, the present and travels gradually
backwards in time until he reaches the last village, which, with its dominantly
Tibetan character, represents what the now definitely Chinese village once
was.  This journey into the past has been in terms not of years but of
events and cultural changes; indeed, it is hardly possible to think of the
history of the district in any other terms, for there is very little authentic
local history.  The Chinese of the adjoining region were once military
colonists, placed as garrisons on the border- marches in the time of the Ming
dynasty.  That dynasty began in the thirteenth century and lasted to the
seventeenth century; sometime during those four centuries considerable numbers
of Chinese colonists were brought into the nearby Taochow districts.
(Descendants of some of those colonists can even today point back to their
ancestral homes, many of which were in the Nanking district in far-off Kiangsu.)
The aboriginal tribes which inhabited the territory were followed by
Mongols.  The so-called Mongol wall (the ruins of which can still be seen,
the fortified end of the long rampart occupying an almost impregnable position
within a bend of the Tao River), was based on one of the garrison cities of the
Mongol dynasty.  In the Field Museum is an octagonal pillar, brought back
from the Kansu-Tibetan border by Dr. Laufer, which commemorated this city of
Yang-ba, now a mere heap of ruins.

So much for the historical background of the district.  The Tibetans of
the villages we mention have the tradition that, in whole or in part, they came
from central Tibet shortly after the downfall of the Yan or Mongol
dynasty.  The Choni Tu-si, who rules over the district traces his lineage
back eighteen generations to a Lhasa family, and certainly the Choni dialect
more nearly resembles that spoken in Lhasa than does any other dialect of
northeastern Tibet.  Unquestionably there must have been other groups of
Tibetans or unidentified peoples in the region, whose cultures were merged with
that brought from central Tibet.

With only a few exceptions these mixed villages, called by the Chinese "pan
fan tsi" (half-Tibetan) are under the rule of the Choni Tu-si, who holds
authority from the Chinese government.  The pattern of hereditary rule is
little changed by such an overlordship on the part of the Chinese
authorities.  The Choni Tu-si, or, as the Tibetans call him, Choni
Tbon-po, administers the affairs of the region through village
head-man.  The court of final appeal in matters of law, equity, or
administration is the Choni Tusi himself.  In view of the deep-rooted
aversion of the Tibetans to paying anything in the nature of taxes, it is
interesting to note that although regular taxes of a sort are collected they are
not nearly so heavy as those paid by the Chinese of the nearby county of
Taochow.  All taxes go to the Choni Tu-si personally, and except for
special assessments levied on him, none are turned over to the Chinese
government.  In each village there is a head-man ("tseng-kuan"), who is
appointed by the Choni Tu-si and who is responsible for the affairs of the
village.  As the village is the basic unit of control, this head-man has a
position of considerable authority.  Next above the village is "the banner"
an aggregation of several villages- which has to do with the organization
of the militia, to which every village furnishes a quota.  Matters
concerning the "banner" as a whole are settled in a council of the head-men
under the direct on of official point by, and acting under, the Ta-si
himself.

The Chinese of the nearby Chinese communities are organized in exactly the
same way as the Chinese of the Hochow district, as described in connection
with the cultural contacts between the Chinese and the Moslems.  Again we
find that the village is the important unit of organization, that the village
organization is integrated in the county, and that the village authorities are
answerable to the county magistrate.  These Chinese villages are taxed much
more heavily than are the "pan fan tsi" villages.  Direct control by the
Chinese government has been extended over a few of the Tibetan villages;
the reasons for this are not altogether clear- certainly it is not a case of any
preponderance of Chinese culture, for some of these villages are quite far up in
Tibetan country and in their culture conform more to the Tibetan pattern than to
the Chinese.  Conversely, there are villages which have become almost
exclusively Chinese but still remain under the Choni Tu-si.  From local
tradition we learn that secessionist movements have taken place at times when
the community resented some decision or fiat of his and have brought about
direct control by the Chinese.  Then, too, there were, and still are, a
number of hereditary chiefs of minor importance (some of whom have only a dozen
or more families as subjects). In many instances these groups are being
eliminated by nearby local authorities, the means used being not unlike those
used by Hitler in taking over Austria.  It is interesting to note that in
no instance has the Chinese government tried to put into force the system of
taxation current in the typical Chinese regions.

Another political factor is the secular power wielded by the great religious
establishments or by powerful lamas- Living Buddhas.  This varies from
village to village and from place to place.  In the river district alone
there are about a dozen of these religious establishments, or
lamaseries.  In some instances they are the effective governing agency
and have subjects directly under them.  In other places they function under
the patronage of the Choni Tu-si, often times having really the upper hand
as far as power is concerned.  Again they may be at outs with him; and
since they can carry on a very effective opposition he must reckon with
them.

At the present time there is no overt action on the part of the Chinese
government leading to direct political domination.  Indeed, it is
sometimes amazing to find the Chinese officials seemingly content to let
matters remain in forms that are centuries old and obviously outmoded.  But
on the other hand there is a very clear and certain note of Chinese dominance in
all that concerns the "pan fan tsi" village communities.  Under orders from
their Tu-si, the inhabitants cut and haul lumber for the use of the
provincial government and perform much service for the Chinese
government.  Behind every problem that may arise in border affairs is the
sure knowledge that the Chinese government is all powerful when it wishes to be
and that their Tu-si continues in office as a tool (if at times a very unwilling
one) of the Chinese authorities.  It is hard to determine just how largely
this factor underlies the culture contact of the border.  It has not been a
disruptive force, as it has been in some other regions, acting to enforce
colonization or to deprive Tibetans of their land; and in some ways, especially
in the matter of taxation, the Tibetans seem to fare better than the
Chinese.  Nevertheless, the power of the government looms large in the
thinking of every Tibetan or half-Tibetan of the region, and by creating issues
of prestige and advantage has definitely affected the cultural contacts of
the border peoples.  After all, this prestige and advantage can fairly be
said to represent one phase of the demonstrably stronger culture of the Chinese,
and we are justified, therefore, in giving it place among the interactive
aspects of the two cultures.

Applying to the Chinese-Tibetan contact the same criteria used in
defining the Chinese-Moslem pattern, we find those criteria realigned: in
religion and occupation the Chinese and Tibetans are similar; in race and
language they are dissimilar.  Yet, lest we should be tempted to assign
identical values to these factors, we must remember that the words similar and
dissimilar represent two extremes, and all the facts that we label one or the
other may lie, in reality, at any distance from those two extremes and may, in
addition, show infinite variations both of kind and of degree.  In contrast
to the violent incompatibility existing between the Chinese and the Moslems, we
have between Chinese and Tibetans a mutual tolerance in matters of religious
belief and practise.  One of the three great religions professed by
the Chinese is Buddhism, and in the mixed religion practised by the Tibetans
Buddhism is one of the two principal ingredients; thus is created an adequate
basis for religious comity.  In noting the religious differences
between the Chinese and Moslems we have already discussed the religious
complex of the Chinese; the Chinese of the border differ from those already
described in that they place a greater emphasis upon Buddhism to the neglect of
some aspects of Confucianism.  In particular do the more uneducated tend to
become almost entirely Buddhistic in observance; the scholars, of course,
give greater place to the doctrines of the Sacred Books of Confucian teaching
and always refer to themselves as members of the Confucian sect.  Also, the
Chinese of the border country possibly influenced by the religious fervor
of the Tibetans- appear more religious-minded than their fellow countrymen of
the Titao district.  Thus we see that in assigning similar values to the
religious beliefs and practises of the Chinese of this district and those
of another district we must qualify the evaluation, for there are distinct
differences both of kind and degree.  When we say that the Chinese and the
Tibetans have the same religion, we mean that because of mutual tolerance the
differences in their beliefs have no fundamental effect on the cultural
relationship between the two groups.

The faith of the Tibetans is, in fact, far different from that of the
Chinese.  Buddhism as developed among the Tibetans has been largely
adulterated by the incorporation of many of the beliefs and practises of
the early Bon religion of Tibet.  Sects which are frankly of the sorcerer
variety flourish, and the admission of the mountain gods, earth spirits, and
water demons of the localized Bon religion to the Buddhist pantheon has changed
the horizon of the Tibetan's religious thinking and has even marked the very
landscape in which he lives.  On the one hand the Tibetan works his hardest
to fulfill all the requirements of Buddhism, devoting himself to prayers and
meditation; on the other hand he marks his calendar with the festivals of local
mountain gods and crowns the mountain tops with shrines of fearsome beings that
are like gods of a truly savage faith.

Not only is the content of Tibetan religious belief quite different from that
of the Chinese, but the Tibetan in his whole-hearted devotion to, and absorption
in, things religious differs significantly from the more matter-of-fact
Chinese.  We have defined the essential aspect of Chinese culture as
consisting of a special preoccupation with the tie with the past.  The
corresponding aspect of Tibetan culture may be discovered in religion, although
there is a secondary response to the demands of the community, communal
necessity superseding any demand of the individual. Bit, underlying these
considerable differences in expression and importance of religion among the two
groups, there is the common factor of Buddhism, and overlying them is the
tolerance we have remarked; thus, in making a broad classification, we are not
unjustified-particularly in the face of the Chinese-Moslem conflict-in stating
that the Chinese and Tibetans are similar in religion.

In the matter of occupation there is less need for qualification in putting
the Chinese and the Tibetans of the region into the same category.  Both
are peasant farmers, the greater number owning their own fields; they raise not
only all their own food but a surplus which is sold to provide whatever cloth
and general notions are needed.  Both engage in some subsidiary
value-producing activity: the Chinese supply wood and fodder to the city and
keep a few sheep for wool, which is made into felts and woolen cloth; the
Tibetans keep some livestock (their diet is heavier in milk products and meat
than that of the Chinese), share the exploitation of the forest to some extent,
and, like the Chinese, sell firewood and charcoal.

In both groups the village is supremely important as a unit of
organization, socially and politically.  The villages are much alike
in size, the average village having a population of between twenty and thirty
families, but in organization and functioning the Chinese village and the
Tibetan village show differences.  Within the organization of the Chinese
village we find not only a compact family unit but a clan system as well.
The Tibetans, on the other hand, have no clearly defined clan organization,
and their family is a much looser group than among the Chinese.
Nevertheless, the Chinese village organization permits a considerable degree of
individualism, whereas in the Tibetan village communal activity completely
over shadows individual activity.  Whether this is because the Chinese
family and clan compete with the village organization, thereby acting as a check
on the exercise of village authority, or whether the more advanced level of
Chinese culture necessarily entails greater liberty of action and
initiative for the individual is hard to determine.  In all matters
relating to the village-owned woodlands and pasture-lands, as well as in all
matters regulating the time of planting, harvesting, etc., the Tibetan village
acts with a solidarity and unanimity that is comparatively lacking in a Chinese
village community, although that community also owns communal wood-lots and
pastures.

In spite of these differences- which still permit the use of the word
"similar" but forbid the assigning of identical values in any proposed equation-
the subsistence routine is substantially the same for the Chinese farmer and for
the Tibetan farmer, and the village of the one has a close resemblance to that
of the other.  In the subsequent discussion, centering around the
development of a Chinese village out of what was once a Tibetan village, the
similarities of occupation and organization will have considerable
significance.

When we say that the Chinese and Tibetans are racially dissimilar, we again
have to qualify the word, for both are unquestionably Mongoloid.  It is
greatly to be regretted that we do not have anthropometric data as a basis for
comparison and so must content ourselves with saying that the Chinese and
Tibetans differ in appearance to about the same degree as a Frenchman differs
from a typical Italian.  The process of infiltration over a number of
generations has, of course, given rise to many intermediate types, but the
existence of recognizably intermediate types does not conceal the essential
differences of the two parent stocks.

The Choni dialect of Tibet, like other variations of the
rong-skad, or "valley speech,' of the sedentary peoples of
northeastern Tibet, is distinct from the drok-skad, or "steppe
speech," of the nomadic peoples.  It is somewhat like the Lhasa
dialect-particularly in vowel values and its disregarding of final and prefixed
consonants.  It is, of course, radically different from Chinese;
between these two peoples the language dissimilarity is as great as, or
even greater than, that between a Germanic language and a Romance language, and
this dissimilarity must be taken into account in the consideration of any
problem of culture contact between the two peoples.

This culture contact is quite one-sided, the agents being, almost without
exception, Chinese; the contact can be said to be reciprocal only in so far as
the Tibetan community as a whole exerts an influence on the Chinese migrants
within it.  The Tibetans go into Chinese country to visit, but they do not
attempt to settle down and make their way among the people.  The only
exception to this rule that might be cited is the movement of qualified Buddhist
bonzes, or monks, into Chinese territory to officiate in religious
establishments.  Even for such purposes the movement is confined
largely to the borders of Mongolia and in no way enters into the relationship of
the Chinese and Tibetans of our border.  These religious ventures to
Mongolia, and even to Pekin, area very interesting phenomenon; they are carried
on as a recognized trade, in which the bonzes of the Tibetan lamaseries
sell their highly valued religious services to the more wealthy and
simple-hearted Mongols and in due time return with a considerable fortune
in the form of smuggled rifles, which bring enormous further profits to the
pontifical travelers.

The one-sided movement of migrants from the Chinese into the Tibetan country
is chiefly attributable to two causes: first, population pressure makes the
fallow fields of the Tibetan villages very tempting to the land hungry Chinese;
and second, the Tibetan country for a number of reasons is the traditional
refuge for Chinese of the nearby communities whenever rebellion or banditry is
rife.  We have already seen that the Chinese, with their large families,
constitute a population reservoir from which the overflow will pass into any
group which does not have a similarly strong population pressure.
Certainly the Tibetans, and especially the village people of the Choni district,
offer no such resistance, for their population is unquestionably on the
decrease.  An extreme example is a village in the valley of Luchu, very
near the upper limits of the district, which, because it is relatively
inaccessible to the stream of Chinese immigration, appears to be dying
out.  Among the twenty or more houses there, four or five are deserted and
in various stages of dilapidation, and at least half of the area once cultivated
(indicated by terracing and boundary ridges) is now permanently fallow.  So
it is in most of the tributary valleys of the Tao River, where Chinese migration
has not kept pace with the recession of the Tibetan population.  Even where
a line has persisted one finds a family of three or four persons occupying a
great house built to shelter a dozen or more and tilling only a fraction of
their fields.

It is hard to say just what forces have caused this gradual decline in
population.  Most of the causes to which population decline is generally
ascribed are not operative in this case.  Chinese population pressure has
followed rather than produced the fact; economic pressure cannot be held
accountable, for there is considerable more land available than is being
utilized, and the native population is not sufficient for an adequate
exploitation of the natural resources. It has been suggested that when a
stronger and disruptive culture comes in contact with a simpler and more
primitive one, breaking down ceremonies and beliefs, population follows because
the community as a whole loses the basic satisfaction of a well rounded
pattern of life.  The impact of the somewhat similar and extremely tolerant
Chinese system of religion and philosophy could not have produced the results
observable among the Tibetans; yet religion has unquestionably had both directly
and indirectly, an effect in producing this decline in population.
Northern Buddhism as practised by the Tibetans is not only basically agnostic,
but it is apathetic and antisocial in its philosophy of negation and in its
emphasis on asceticism.  All sexual irregularity is condemned, the marriage
relationship itself is defined as only a degree less sinful, and the desire for
progeny is stigmatized as a "desire of the blood" incompatible with religious
success.  What all this has done to the Tibetan and how large a part it
plays in producing population decline cannot be stated with any accuracy,
but it certainly has had a part.

A clearer cause of the population decline is to be recognized in the
religious institution of monasticism.  Various estimates have been made as
to the percentage of the Tibetan population to be found in lamaseries.
There are no adequate figures available, but for this part of Tibet about one
seventh of the population would not be too high an estimate.  If the
sex ratio were anywhere near equal, that would be nearly one out of every three
males.  I know of many families who have one boy out of two, or even two
boys out of three, in lamaseries.  Such an arrangement has not only thrown
the sex ratio and marriage out of balance but has resulted in homosexuality,
incest, and a great amount of license.  Correspondingly, there is a very
high incidence of venereal disease.  This is particularly true of the
farming peoples of the lower part of the Tao valley.  All this has a very
direct influence on population decline.  One further physiological factor
should be mentioned: the introduction of the use of opium among those Tibetans
nearest to Chinese communities and influence.  As in the case of the
introduction of liquor among the American Indians, that drug produces far
more disastrous effects upon the Tibetans than upon the Chinese, who are
habituated to its use and have developed a certain degree of resistance.

Finally, a low resistance to disease has played a part in the population
recession among the Tibetans.  In instance after instance of epidemics of
smallpox, scarlet fever, and influenza, as well as in treating individual cases
of infections, we have found that the Tibetans have much less resistance to
such germ infections than do the Chinese.  I have vaccinated Chinese
children and Tibetan children from the same tube of vaccine and found that with
the Chinese it would barely "take," while the Tibetans would have cases of
varioloid which in general severity approached light cases of smallpox itself.
The fear the Tibetans have of epidemic diseases and the strict quarantines
they put into effect, in contrast to the careless attitude of the average
Chinese community, clearly indicate this difference in resistive power.

Not only have the tempting fields and receding population of the Tibetan
community invited Chinese penetration, but the Tibetan country has again and
again been a most effective refuge for those fleeing from the three great
Mohammedan rebellions and from other, secondary visitations of bandits and
contending armies.  In such circumstances the closely integrated
Tibetan community acts more promptly and efficiently to defend itself than does
the Chinese community, for the Tibetans are by habit armed to an extent unknown
among the Chinese.  The Tao River, too, has been a protecting barrier,
and back of all the fords and passes which offer means of defense are the great
forests to afford cover and fuel for the refugees.

The Tibetans, like many unsophisticated peoples, are rather softhearted
toward refugees, especially if they be destitute. (They are often
sufficiently troublesome toward those who have possessions and
wealth).  By Tibetan custom the right of refuge has become one of the basic
rights, and when it is reinforced by the claims of acquaintance and the
functioning of the "guest-host" system this right of refuge can open a path into
the most exclusive of Tibetan communities.  During the most recent
Mohammedan rebellion, when many were fleeing its troubles and violence, we were
accorded permission to stay in a Tibetan village with a tolerance that would not
have been possible under ordinary circumstances.

Having discussed the occasions and agents which promote contact between
Chinese and Tibetans, we shall indicate briefly the salient aspects of the
process involved.  The refugee situation does not, of course, constitute a
complete process of contact; it merely creates favorable circumstances for the
process, just as does the allure of empty fields, economic adventure, or manual
labor in the exploitation of the natural resources.  Sometimes the
processor contact is contained within the mechanics of intermarriage, which is
of two kinds: the matrilocal, in which the Chinese man takes his place as
son-in-law in the Tibetan home, and the patrilocal, in which he is able through
his wife's connections to set up his own home in the Tibetan community.

In every instance intermarriage is between a Chinese man and a Tibetan woman-
never between a Tibetan man and a Chinese woman.  This is attributable
partly to the fact that, except in the refugee situation, the advance agents of
culture contact are men and partly to the dislocation of the sex ratio among the
Tibetans by the inroad made on the male population by the lamaseries.
There is still another element.  Tibetans have revealed to me that they
find Chinese women, with their extreme decorousness, much less attractive
than the Tibetan women who, with a background of greater social freedom, have
very much of a "good -sport" outlook and manner.  And Chinese men admit,
although rather shamefacedly, that Tibetan women, with their rough-and-readiness
of action and great out-of-doors industry are definitely attractive to
them.

Whenever a likely young Chinese is taken into a Tibetan home as a son-in-law,
he naturally becomes as like a Tibetan in dress, mannerisms, and speech as he
can.  If other agents do not operate to bring him into further contact with
Chinese culture, he may become very much of a Tibetan.  His children will
be brought up as Tibetans, and after a generation or so only a Tibetan nickname,
such as "Chinese boy," baby be left to indicate that there is any Chinese blood
in the family.  In the number of children, however, his family will be more
Chinese than Tibetan.

When a Chinese man marries a Tibetan wife and establishes his own home,
however, he generally makes an effort to set up a Chinese home and to maintain
the Chinese manner of living and outlook.  Especially is this true if he
has living with him any members of his Chinese connection mother, brothers,
or other relatives.  Although the girls of the family will copy the
Tibetans in dress and manners the boys will be brought up with the idea that
they are Chinese and, even though they acquire Tibetan mannerisms and habits of
dress, will avoid identification with the Tibetans.  When Chinese cultural
pressure is thus maintained through the processes of contact, these
half-Tibetan homes become foci of Chinese influence and change.

Adoption constitutes another process of contact within the family.
Tibetan families are often pitifully anxious for children, and there are many
instances of their adopting Chinese children.  This is especially true of
boys, who can better perpetuate the family line.  The Chinese lad
becomes thoroughly "Tibetanized" and reacts to Chinese cultural influence
to no greater degree than do the full-bodied Tibetans of the community.

In a strictly Chinese community the children of mixed marriages are Tibetans
often referred to slightingly as half but in a mixed community they seem to have
the same status as those who are entirely Chinese or entirely
Tibetan.  For, although the Tibetans on occasion resent Chinese
domination and can have quite strong feelings against them. It is rather
for what they represent in outside influence than for the fact that they have
Chinese blood in their veins.  If the individual acts in accordance with
recognized behavior patterns, the Tibetans seem to care very little whether he
is half Chinese, half Mongolian, or half something else.

In addition to contacts which are created within the family, there are others
of a strictly economic character.  Certain craftsmen, such as carpenters,
blacksmiths, and millers, very easily obtain a foothold in a Tibetan
community.  They find there a very inferior kind of competition from most
of the Tibetan artisans, although once in a while there is a Tibetan workman of
outstanding skill and reputation.  Much of the trade of to village
will also gradually pass into the hands of the Chinese trader who may come just
on a single trade-errand and remain to open a shop and set up a business.
Finally, there are those who may come into the community life as laborers,
willing to do anything and to work a bit harder than the Tibetans to make a
livelihood.  In this category are harvest laborers, lumbermen, and charcoal
burners.

To complete the picture of this very one-sided cultural contact we must
indicate some of its results.  There is no doubt that the first and most
obvious one is the immediate "Tibetanization" of the migrants.  They come
seeking favor and tolerance from the members of the community, not as
conquerors, so that both convenience and policy favor the adoption of at least a
part of the Tibetan garb and as much of Tibetan usage as they can without
running counter to deep-seated Chinese prejudices.  As has been intimated,
this initial Tibetanization varies in degree according to the different factors
in the process of the cultural contact.  The Chinese son -in-law in a
Tibetan home will go completely Tibetan, but in his own home he will retain some
Chinese usage and technology even though he becomes largely Tibetan in habits,
dress, and home arrangements.  The wholly Chinese family in a Tibetan
community will remain almost entirely Chinese in culture, taking over only
such Tibetan practises as are obviously more convenient or make life in the
community smoother.

This adoption of Tibetan ways is most noticeable in the matter of
clothing.  This is natural, for their clothes are far more convenient for
Tibetan life than are Chinese garments.  Great sheepskin coats, felt-lined
boots, and fur hats are well suited to the rigors of the Tibetan climate and can
be easily procured locally.  As the woman usually bears the
responsibility of preparing clothing for the family, this is the only kind
of attire in homes where the wife is Tibetan.  A Chinese wife may keep to
Chinese clothing for herself, regarding the big Tibetan gown worn without
trousers as being somewhat indecent, but she will try to make Tibetan
garments for the men of the family (yet however much of a Tibetan a Chinese
may become in dress he usually continues to wear trousers).  The Chinese
readily adopt the pots and pans of the Tibetan home; the women folk discard the
two water buckets carried on a shoulder-pole and follow the Tibetan practise of
the single large vessel slung from the shoulders and balanced on the small of
the back.  The men learn to use saddles, pack-gear, and other such pieces
of Tibetan equipment.

There is, of course, not only an outright adoption of the Tibetan language
for all the contacts of daily life during the initial Tibetanization of the
migrants, but there is also a certain amount of linguistic borrowing.  The
two most notable aspects of such borrowing are, first, the acceptance of certain
distinctly Tibetan forms of construction (most obvious in the matter of word
order), and second, the borrowing of Tibetan words that become incorporated into
the Chinese language of the border areas.  A complete analysis of word
order would be a most complex matter, so we shall select only one salient
difference between the two languages and then, by taking one example, show how
the influence of Tibetan usage has modified the Chinese word order.  In
typical Tibetan the verb always comes at the end of the sentence or phrase; in
Chinese the verb order is much like that in English.  As a short example we
have the sentence, "mount the horse." The Chinese sentence would be: ch'i (ride)
shang (up) ma (horse).  But in the case of an imperative there is an
atypical usage; the sentence is introduced by the word pa (sign of the optative)
and the word order is reversed, the verbal phrase coming at the end: pa (sign of
the optative) ma (horse) ch'i (ride) shang (up).  In such case the use of
pa is essential.

The typical Tibetan version of the sentence would be: rta (horse) zhon
(ride-imperative form).  This rule in Tibetan by which the verb always
comes at the end-as in German- has influenced word order in Chinese as spoken in
the border communities to the extent that, ignoring the usage of the word pa
(sign of the optative), they will say: ma (horse) ch'i (ride) shang (up).
The change in the order of two words seems a mere trifle until one hears the
sentence with critical Chinese ears; then it sounds utterly atypical and foreign
to standard Chinese usage, even though all the words are Chinese.  This is
just one example of how border Chinese reveals the influence of Tibetan
usage.

Tibetan words are also incorporated into the vocabulary of the Chinese
migrants and, to a certain extent, disseminated throughout the communities along
the border which, as a result of the culture contacts between the two peoples,
have become largely Chinese.  Such words are pronounced with all the
peculiarities of the Chinese phonetic system and with Chinese tones added to
syllables that originally were non-tonal.  The problem of linguistic
borrowing between the Chinese and Tibetans is complicated by the factor of
common origin, and tone is even more confused and controversial.  The short
list which, follows will serve to indicate specific instances of Chinese
borrowing and to show how Chinese tones have been used.  As the matter of
language borrowing is involved in another one of the four cases of culture
contact we are describing, a short statement of the essential differences
between Chinese and Tibetan is here inserted.

Unquestionably there are fundamental similarities between Chinese and
Tibetan, especially if we take for comparison modern, spoken Tibetan rather than
classical Tibetan, which has been so greatly dominated by Sanskrit form and
usage.  Dr. Sapir, in view of this fact, has very aptly placed classical
Tibetan and modern Tibetan in two different categories.  Tibetan is
basically a monosyllabic language but, through the frequency of combination and
the use of many particles, exhibits many polysyllabic features. (Chinese, of
course, also manifests similar phenomena but to a lesser degree.) Two
phonetic distinctions sharply separate Chinese and Tibetan.  One is
the series of retroflex consonants that is such a marked characteristic of
Chinese, and the other is the Chinese system of tones.  Tibetan has been
called a tonal language; if we concede that what we get from the placement of
initial consonants is "tone" (far forward being high and far back, low), then
Tibetan is "tonal"-but no more so than, let us say, Hindi, or many other
languages.  Chinese on the other hand has an arbitrary set of tones (four
or five, depending on the dialect) which may be given to any combination of
sounds no matter how far forward or how far back the initial consonant be
placed.  Thus when compared with Chinese, Tibetan may well be classified as
a non-tonal language although not no-tonal in the strictest sense.

The added Chinese tones have been indicated by numerals written above the
syllables.  Care has been taken not to include any instance in which the
Chinese word and the Tibetan word have obviously been derived from a common
source.  Many such words are to be found in the centers of language usage
and culture, but the list given above contains words incorporated into the
language only in the area of contact and common only in border usage.  In
addition to the Chinese tones and the transposition into the retroflex series of
many of the initial sounds, the stresses and vowel qualities have been clearly
modified to harmonize with the typical language pattern into which the word has
been incorporated.

Closely associated with language borrowings is a certain change in the use of
names.  The Tibetans of Amdo have only personal names; there are no
strictly family names or surnames.  This lack is sometimes compensated for
by the use of village or clan names, or of nicknames prefixed to the personal
name.  The typical Chinese, however, are punctilious in the use of the
surname, personal names being rarely used outside of an extremely limited
circle.  It is noticeable that the Chinese of the border towns, and
especially those living in the Tibetan communities, tend more and more to
disregard surnames and use only personal names- often defined by reference
to some personal idiosyncrasy such as "hare-lip" or "cripple"- in one another,
thereby following Tibetan usage.

The Chinese migrants accept to a considerable extent the Tibetan
communal ideals and customs relating to village loyalty and communal
activities.  In a way they can do nothing else and still remain in the
community; but through continued residence they become accustomed to such
communal activity and will often declare that village loyalty such as the
Tibetans have is preferable to the greater individualism in the Chinese village,
for one of its results is a somewhat greater degree of community security.
When, however, Chinese infiltration has progressed to the point where a
community is preponderantly Chinese, that loyalty and communal behavior become
correspondingly weakened.

Lastly, the migrants take on much of Tibetan religious belief and
practise.  The sudden accentuation of the Buddhist aspects of belief and
observance in the Chinese religious complex is of course initiated to a
considerable degree by the necessity or desirability of gaining favor with the
Tibetans, but before long the new religion acquires a definite and genuine hold
on the Chinese mind and temperament.  This conversion to a revived form of
Buddhism manifests itself in a number of ways.  There is, first of all, a
personal participation in Tibetan religious activity, most frequently expressed
in the saying of Tibetan prayers and religious formulae, personal
participation in the circumambulation of shrines, the use of the prayer wheel,
and the making of regular offerings of incense to the local deities.  There
is a unique family participation, in conformance to Tibetan religious custom, in
the designating of sons as priests in the lamaseries, and this strikes hard at
the Chinese family ideal and desire for progeny.  Finally, there is
participation in all the village or community festivals by personal
attendance, and the making of contributions to defray expenses.

In distinction to these initial results of Tibetan culture on the agents of
contact-migrants that come from Chinese regions into a Tibetan village community
there later develops a secondary cumulative effect on the Tibetans.  Of
course, trade contacts made by the Tibetans themselves and certain aspects of
overt or covert political pressure all contribute to enforcing or inducing a
response on the part of the Tibetans to the pressure of Chinese culture, but the
agents through whom the greatest degree of Chinese cultural pressure comes
to bear on the Tibetans is through those same migrants.

The isolated migrant left to himself in the midst of Tibetan influence and
environment would no doubt sooner or later become Tibetan; but behind him, and
in successive stages reinforcing him, is the sustained population pressure from
the Chinese country.  One by one, others follow his lead, pressing into the
Tibetan community through the opening he has made.  Once a number of
Chinese families are established in a village, simply as a matter of the
difference in the birth rate of the two groups (for even with a Tibetan wife a
Chinese man produces a larger family than is found in the all-Tibetan marriage),
the Chinese are sure to gain; and bit by bit the community becomes more and more
like a Chinese village.  Finally, Chinese influence increases because the
agents who exert that influence and spread that culture have a definite
advantage over the Tibetans: namely, a certain "savoir faire" when it comes to
dealing with the encroachments of the Chinese government.  They can
talk the language of government officials and wealthy merchants and traders, and
they have definitely superior business ability and industry.  The village
oil-press or grist-mill sooner or later passes into the hands of a Chinese if,
as is generally the case, he has not started it himself.  So by superior
intelligence and initiative the Chinese members of the village community forge
to the front.

The impact of Chinese culture upon the Tibetans is manifested in a number of
ways, and just as clearly as is the initial Tibetanization of the Chinese
migrants.  Indications of such impact run all the way from changes in
habits of dress and in building arrangements to changes in language usage and
nomenclature.  It can be safely said that the Tibetans of this region
regard trousers as superfluous, feeling that their long coats bloused at the
hips and falling to anywhere from the ankles to above the knees, as occasion or
the varying custom of each district might require are quite sufficient to
modesty.  As we have mentioned, the Chinese hangs onto his trousers no
matter how big a Tibetan cost he may wear, and so the general use of trousers
among the Tibetans of the so-called half-Tibetan villages has become a symbol of
swank or prestige.  Although the Tibetans of any district upon gala
occasions wear highly-colored jackets or shirts in addition their "falling
apart" and "falling off" coats, it is only those in close contact with the
Chinese who have taken to wearing such shirts every day.  Still more
significant is the rapid spread of the use of chopsticks among the
Tibetans, for chopsticks area typically Chinese implement and the degree of
their use among Tibetans is in direct ratio to the degree of Chinese
cultural penetration.

Most significant of all the material borrowings is the adoption among the
Tibetans of the kang- the heated platform or masonry bed of the Chinese
which is the most important part of the Chinese house.  In the great
earthquake of 1922, when so many thousands of villages in eastern Kansu
were destroyed, it was interesting to note the order followed in repairing the
home.  In the bitterly cold winter weather, walls and a roof were matters
of secondary importance.  The first concern was to make a kane and build a
smudge fire of refuse and stable- cleanings under it; then the family camped
comfortably on top of the heated platform until the matter of walls and roof
could be attended to.  The Tibetans as a whole seem more architecturally
inclined than the Chinese-perhaps because the fine timbers of the region
encourage building ambitions.  The Tibetan house of the Choni district is
quite an imposing two-story, fort-like structure, superior in every way to the
typical Chinese house (though in the nearby Chinese communities the Tibetan
style of architecture has been adopted).  But in the matter of the
kang, the Tibetans are following the Chinese slowly, for in the Tibetan
communities farther removed from Chinese influence it is unknown, or at least
used only infrequently.  In the Choni district there is only one to a home,
and it is so constructed that the fire in the semi-open hearth serves not only
for cooking but for heating the platform as well.  The Chinese on the
other hand, must have one in every room, and indeed the signification of a
Tibetan village can be gauged with a fair degree of accuracy by the number of
kangs found in its homes.

We also find a change among the Tibetans in the matter of surnames.  In
those villages which have sustained the greatest degree of cultural contact
with the Chinese and in which the re-sinification of the original initially
Tibetanized migrants has therefore progressed the furthest, we find that the
Tibetans have arbitrarily taken unto themselves Chinese surnames, the
entire population often taking the same name.  Throughout much of the Choni
district one surname occurs with the greatest frequency- that of the Choni Tu-si
himself.  The adoption of a surname is most interesting when we consider it
in the light of the origin of surnames among the Chinese themselves.
Originally, the people or subjects of a state were called the "black-haired
peoples," and the ideograph for the syllable "people" was the picture of a man
kneeling, with his hands tied behind his back.  Later, as a special
honor-almost like the creation of a hereditary order of nobility- the emperor
conferred family names.  The book of surnames is known as the book of "the
hundred surnames," so it would seem that the number was once strictly
limited.  Now all Chinese have surnames, and the word for citizens or the
people is "hundred surnames." The Tibetans in borrowing surnames thus seem to be
following a step that the Chinese themselves once took in social
organization.

In the processes of culture contact the Tibetans have also borrowed
extensively from the Chinese language, and we present a sample list of such
borrowings.  The words have been properly incorporated into the
language, with no attempt made to reproduce Chinese tones or inflection,
and with the consonants represented by the nearest Tibetan equivalents.

A comparison of this list with that of the words borrowed from the Tibetan by
the Chinese and of the material and symbolic borrowings between the two peoples
indicates that the Chinese borrowings have been largely of a utilitarian nature
whereas those of the Tibetans have been of a more cultural and symbolic
nature.

Only in the matter of religion is there little, if any, change.  It
would seem that even in the face of a definitely superior culture, positive
religious fervor has some advantage over passive religion, for even a
Tibetan community which has been made over almost entirely into a Chinese
community will bear the stamp of the Tibetan emphasis on religion, the great
force of their belief exceeding that of a definitely superior culture.

The general process of cultural contact and change between these two distinct
cultural groups has generated surprisingly little ill-feeling.  Nowhere is
there the bitter, though smoldering. enmity found between Moslems and
Chinese.  Yet, though the degree may vary according to both the
individual and the community, there is no doubt that the Chinese feel
definitely superior to, and look down upon, the Tibetans.  After all, the
Tibetans historically are to them part of the barbarians and their names--the
th (eastern barbarians), runi (western barbarians), and man
(southern barbarians)-stand as . terms of reproach on the pages of Chinese
history.  The Tibetans are a singularly proud and sensitive people and
resent such an attitude accordingly. the various attitudes generated by such
opinions are factors in the cultural contacts of the two peoples.

Without attempting to give a completely balanced summary of the various
stages in the creation of a Chinese village out of what was once a Tibetan
community, it is possible to epitomize the whole by bringing into relief three
aspects of that process and change.  The first Chinese migrants are willing
to sacrifice a great part of their heritage in order to fit into the new
environment, but it is only when a Chinese has given up everything else
that he can bring himself to renounce Chinese burial customs and veneration of
the dead.  The Tibetans bury their dead, or rather dispose of them
either by exposure to the vultures on some mountain side, by burning, or by
consigning the bodies to the waters of the river.  The river Tibetans
generally practise the last-named method.  So the matter on which Chinese
culture makes its last stand at the end of any number of compromises is that of
burial, and soon after the first migrants come to the village W-11 be set
aside.  The Tibetans have little or no dread in regard to their own methods
of disposing of the dead; but burying the dead is to them a fearsome practise,
and the plot becomes the haunt of unappeased spirits that have not found release
for the next rebirth.  To the Chinese that plot represents the one
essential aspect of tradition and cultural heritage which they will not
relinquish.

Much later, when, by successive arrivals of new migrants, by the slow but
sure advance of a higher birth-rate, and by the steady pressure of greater
racial virility and economic fitness, the one-time Tibetan village has become
very much like a Chinese community, or has at least a preponderance of
Chinese characteristics, as the crowning proof of its sinification, the use of
the cart enters into the village agricultural routine and technique.
The cart is a strictly Chinese method of transportation, and the Tibetans avoid
its use with a peculiar obstinacy.

Even when the village has become all "Chinese," however, the quiver shrines
of the mountain gods on the tops of the highest mountains are still tended and
replenished year after year (the mountain gods are accepted as the gods of the
locality); for certain aspects of Tibetan culture and religious observance
have persisted in spite of the otherwise nearly complete transformation of the
Tibetan village into a Chinese village.

Thus, the case of the cultural contact between the Chinese faming communities
and the Tibetan faming communities along the border, as exemplified by
conditions in the Choni half-Tibetan villages, represents the impact and steady
pressure of a more vigorous culture and people upon a weaker one, beginning with
infiltration and ending frequently with dispossession or absorption.
In the process the stronger culture sustains changes closely related to, if not
identified with, the strongest aspect of the subordinated culture, and the
impress of Tibetan religion remains long after other Tibetan characteristics
have vanished.

IV. THE MOSLEMS AND THE NOMADIC TIBETANS

The third case of culture contact in the region of the Kansu-Tibetan border
is that which occurs between the Moslems living in farming villages and the
nomadic Tibetans of the upper steppe country.  Some of the Moslem
communities described in the first part of this paper- those nearest the Tibetan
border and some villages in the Taochow district-are included in the group now
under consideration.  The villages of the Taochow district exhibit certain
regional peculiarities of dress and house-style and differences in
agricultural routine incident to the higher altitude, but they are in essentials
very like the other exclusively Moslem communities.

It is at this point that the nomadic, or tent-dwelling, Tibetans really enter
our discussion, but because when we come to discuss the differences and contacts
between the nomadic and sedentary Tibetans we shall describe at length their
manner of life, it is necessary here to mention only such aspects of their
culture and subsistence economy as give rise to the need and occasion for
contact with the Moslems.  The particular nomadic tribes which furnish the
most typical incidence of trade contacts with the Moslem are the Dok-wo,
Ta-tzen, She-tsang, Sa-mtsa, Bu-wa, Ka-chu-ka, Rzak-dum-ba, Sha-me, Za-ru,
and Chiao-ko.  These tribes, with the exception of Shetsang, Sa-mtsa
and Za-ru, are entirely nomadic and are considerably removed from the border
area.  The three tribes mentioned are partly sedentary and are nearer both
to the border and to the farming divisions of their own tribes.  There is a
distinct tendency for tribes close to the Tibetan farming districts of the
border to do their trading for grain among the farming half of their own tribes,
even though they are not far from the Chinese border.  The more distant
nomads, on the other hand, do not stop at the Tibetan farming communities but,
having come so far, go a little farther to the Chinese border and beyond,
thereby reaching the Moslem communities.  Thus, the typical trade contact
between the Moslems of the farming communities and the Tibetan nomads is a
long-range matter, proximity in no wise entering in.  An exception is to be
found in the case of the tribes west of this strip of nomadic tribes, who would
have to travel for almost a month to reach the Chinese border, and for that
reason depend on the Tibetan farming communities in the lower levels of the
Yang-tze basin, in Khan, for their grain, never going to the Kansu border for
seasonal trade although the hardy and adventurous Moslem traders do go to
them.

Nowhere in the territory occupied by these tribes is the altitude less than
about 1.1,000 feet above sea level; therefore, they can grow nothing for
themselves.  There are some edible greens in the region, but, except for
those of the onion family, all are distasteful to the nomad; some of the tribes
even refuse to eat the large fine-flavored mushrooms that grow on the
steppe.  The edible potentella supplies a small tuber that is tasty
and a great delicacy-the tubers are at beat about the size of a thirty-two
caliber bullet-but even in the most favored spots it requires almost a day's,
labor or dig a pint of the little roots, and they are good only in the early
spring and late fall.  Thus if he were to depend entirely upon what he
could produce the Tibetan nomad would be restricted to a diet made up
exclusively of meat and milk products.  Some of the Golok tribes, far up
along the pilgrim trail to Lhasa, sometimes do go for considerable periods
without grains of any sort; but the Shimdrok tribes. as the tribes I have listed
are called, consider grain a necessity.

The region of their home is partly true steppe and partly grass-covered
mountains of rounded contours.  In the midst of this country, limestone
massifs are found in clusters, their peaks rising far above the 14,000-foot
limit of the highest pastures of the nomads.  Some of it is in the basin of
the Yellow River, and the southern fringes are in the Yang-tze drainage.
It has by far the best grass-lands in northeastern Tibet; north of this section
of the Koko Nor the land is broken by the salt lakes and marshes of Tsai-dam and
by stretches of near-desert country, and west of the range of the Shimdrok
tribes the Golok country is not only higher and more mountainous but has
extensive tracts which have been completely denuded of vegetation by swarms of
mouse like rodents.  As an index of the comparative excellence of the
Shimdrok pasture lands the sheep, horses and cattle of this region are the
largest in northeastern Tibet.

Neither in past history nor in present social or political organization do
the Moslems and Tibetan nomads have anything in common.  The historical
background of the Moslems has already been discussed, as has that of the
Tibetans, in a way, for there is little reason to distinguish between the
historical background of the nomadic Tibetans and that of the sedentary tribes
along the border.  What little tradition of origin there is among the
nomads at the present time serves only to emphasize the uncertainty of that
origin.  Some hundreds of years ago the chroniclers seem to have lost count
of just how many), the kingdom of Hor extended in part, at least, over this
portion of Tibet.  There are a number of points in the Shimdrok range that
are pointed out as places where battles took place between the armies of Hor and
China.  Just south of the winter camp sites of the Rzak-dum-ba tribe,
far up in a magnificent circle of limestone peaks, I was shown, across a great
gorge- like valley, the mouth of a cave in the sheer face of a thousand-foot
cliff; in that cave are said to be the saddle, weapons, and armor of the
Hor-lin-rgyal-po (king of Hor-ling), and some day his successor will come out of
that cave and ride once more to lead the Tibetans to victory over their
enemies.

For all such traditions, the Tibetans are not sure that they are truly the
descendants of the Hor, and I have been able to find no tribal history that goes
back more than three hundred years.  It is even possible that not so very
long ago the region was inhabited by faming peoples; both on the Ba plain where
the Yellow River flows into Chinese country and along the banks of that river
where the Black River flows into it, there are remains of villages and clearly
demarcated fields.  Indeed, not far from Sok-tsong, at the knee of the
Yellow River, there is a wide flat, called Drag-skye tang (rice-sprout plain),
which poses with added force the question whether there have not been very
recent changes in climate; for these places are 12,000 feet above sea level and
at the present time have such a short summer-only about twenty nights in the
year are free of frost-that the natives claim even barley will not ripen.
Tribal history always seems to begin with the phrase, "We came from...."

In political organization there is a slight resemblance between the Moslem
villages and the encampments of the nomadic Tibetan tribes.  That
resemblance lies in the fact that the village and encampment are somewhat
analogous in social structure and have much the -same functions--an
aggregation of families associated for the purpose of protection and to
facilitate the exploitation, either agriculturally or pastorally, of nearby
land.  But there the resemblance ceases.  As we have seen, the village
is integrated into the organization of a county and administered by a county
official, and although it has considerable voice in- the running of its own
affairs it has little to say about its relation with the county as a whole and,
through the county officials, with the provincial government.  The
encampment, on the other hand, although associated with a tribe as a unit
of tribal organization, maintains considerable independence; and, although it
can hardly establish its rights to grazing privileges without the consent
of the tribe as a whole, it can, being nomadic, always secede and go somewhere
else if it finds tribal rulings harsh and arbitrary or the general atmosphere
uncongenial.  Thus it has far more self-determination in its relation
to the next-larger unit of organization than does the Moslem village in regions
administered by the Chinese government; further-more, while tribal custom and
law modify to a certain extent the character of encampment rule, the Tibetans
acknowledge no law or control beyond that of the tribe.  About seventy
years ago some of these tribes paid token-taxes to the Chinese government as a
sort of yearly tribute, but even that has gone out of practise; and, though
in a vague way the Tibetans acknowledge the "emperor's household," i.e., the
Chinese government (many of the Tibetans are not sure whether it is in Peking,
Mukden, or Nanking), to all practical purposes Chinese law is completely
ineffective in the region.  Not only are the tribes Independent of the
Chinese government but they are even more independent of each other.  In
effect they are all sovereign states having complete control over their
territory and fiercely resentful of any encroachments on their sovereign
rights.  Their ware and inter-tribal feuds affect their own freedom of
movement as they seek to carry on the necessary trade, and the division of the
country into dearly defined areas of control makes travel among them a nuisance
because of the necessity of arranging safe conduct, etc., with so many different
authorities.  The Tibetans, though they do not levy formal duties on
caravans passing through, extort various payments for "road rights," "grass and
water rights," and for guides and escorts to ensure protection, so that the
traders pay quite a large hidden tax as they go from tribe to tribe.

The contact existing between the Moslems, whose homes are in the faming
country along the border or accessible from the border, and the Tibetan Nomads
living some distance away as measured by slow caravan travel, is an unique
one.  Not only are they not neighbors, but they are utterly
different.  By each and every criterion we have employed to characterize
the contacts found on the Kansu-Tibetan border, they are dissimilar-and in this
instance we mean dissimilar in the extreme.  Racially the Moslems are
strongly Semitic; and the Tibetans, whatever the complexity of their racial
admixture, are Mongoloid and more akin to the Chinese and other peoples in the
southeastern part of Asia.  The Moslems speak Chinese, while peoples in the
Tibetans speak the nomadic variation, or dialect, of Tibetan.  The Moslems
are monotheists belonging to Islam, whereas the Tibetans subscribe to the
religo-philosophy of Buddhism and worship, in addition, a multitude of gods and
demons inherited from the pre-lamaistic religion of Tibet.  Finally, the
Moslems are a sedentary people, having agriculture as their subsistence economy,
while the Tibetan nomads are a pastoral people, who take especial pride in their
manner of life and have deep-seated prejudices against disturbing the soil.

In spite of the complete dissimilarity of these two peoples, certain factors
in the life, location, and characteristics of each have created an occasion of
contact.  That occasion is found in the reciprocal trade which, operating
as it does at a distance, constitutes a most interesting kind of cultural
contact.  The Moslems are characteristically traders, and their strong
spirit of commercial adventure has put them in touch with all the currents of
world trade which reach this remote part of the Asian highlands.  By their
location on the border, or within easy access to the border, they find
themselves in a position of peculiar advantage to act as middlemen in passing
the produce of Tibet to the outside world and, in lesser degree, to absorb some
of it themselves and aid in its distribution to contiguous Chinese territory. To
carry on trade and travel in the Tibetan country requires a certain mount of
daring and initiative, and the same qualities that have placed the Moslems in
other callings of hardihood and daring have made them traders among the
Tibetans.

This special fitness is well exemplified by what an old Tibetan robber once
said to me.  In telling about the technique of robbing caravans he very
aptly described the difference between the Moslems and the Chinese: "When we
attack a caravan and they begin to cry out 'Lao Tien Ie' (the common Chinese
appeal to the deity) we know that the caravan is practically ours, but if they
cry 'Allah Hu Da' then we know that they are Moslems and we are in for trouble."
Whether this incident also suggests that religion is one of the sources of that
difference is a moot point, but the essential fact remains.

It may be that on the Tibetan side the adventurous spirit of the nomads
also predisposes them to taking part in the venture of trade, but other
immediate causes are more convincingly evident.  The subsistence economy of
the Moslems makes them practically self-supporting, and trade is principally a
means of acquiring more wealth- especially Tibetan trade, which is exceedingly
gainful in proportion to its hazards: but the Tibetan nomads must do some
trading in order to get any grain at all, for their own subsistence economy
furnishes them only with animal products.  Their nearest source of grain
supply is the Tibetan farming communities which lie between them and the border,
but the grain surplus there is rather limited, and there is not nearly so good a
market for nomad products except what can be used locally. The Tibetans
therefore prefer to travel a few days longer to the border markets.

The fact that the nomads have almost a monopoly on the transport system of
the land also tends to involve them in trade. All freight is carried on yaks.
The nomads have the greatest number of these animals; so, either directly, as
the source of supply, or indirectly, by contracting for carrier jobs, they are
placed in advantageous contact with the routine of trade. Finally, the nomads
produce most of the things for which there is a demand; lambskins, wool,
sheepskins, livestock for the central China market, and furs all come from the
steppe country. The possession of all these commodities predisposes the Tibetans
to trade, and by the action of the forces operative in both peoples an effective
occasion for cultural contact is created in the seasonal ebb and flow of that
trade.

The action of this contact is reciprocal but different in its effects in the
two peoples, since cultural force is exerted through differently selected
agents, under different circumstances, and for unequal periods of time. The
Moslem traders who go into the Tibetan country form a smaller percentage of the
population of their home communities than do the Tibetan traders who come down
to the border to trade for grain. The Moslems become traders as a means of
increasing their wealth- there is nothing inherent in their agricultural
subsistence economy to force them into such a course. In one Moslem village that
I know, which was a fair example of a border village with a rather high
percentage of traders, less than half of the heads of families had ever gone
into the Tibetan country as traders.  Among the Tibetans, on the other
hand, practically every head of a family takes part in the annual journey to the
border to trade for the year's supply of grain.

The circumstances under which these agents are exposed to the influences
of the other cultural group and the degree to which they impart cultural
influences also vary.  The Moslem trader goes into the Tibetan country for
periods of time from three months to two years.  Though he travels in a
company which often times represents a rather large caravan, nevertheless, he
will stay, with at best one or two companions, for a long time in very intimate
association with a Tibetan community.  Not only is he exposed to Tibetan
influence for long periods, but because he is necessarily greatly obligated to
the Tibetans and will naturally seek to placate them, his exposure to the
influences of Tibetan culture is favorable to his acquiring Tibetan culture
traits.  When a Tibetan visits a Moslem community in the Chinese border
country, he stays at the most only a month or-so and during that time camps
apart with his Tibetan companions.  And though he is under obligation to
his Moslem host, he has a much less Intimate relation with the Moslem community
than his the Moslem trader In the Tibetan community, who stays in the tent of
his Tibetan host or pitches his own at the door of his Tibetan sponsor.

Moslem traders who go to the nearer tribes frequently go in small parties but
a typical trade caravan starting out on a trade venture among the nomadic
Tibetan tribes is organized on a large scale. The very smallest caravans number
at least two or three "kettles," and the largest may number forty or even fifty
"kettles." (A "kettle" denotes the members of a unit having one campfire and the
same food supply; in other words, they eat out of the same kettle. The group may
vary in size from three men to a dozen, the average being eight or nine.) This
tendency to combine into large caravans comes from a desire for protection and
from the fact that by dividing the expense of guides and escorts- and of the
latter what amounts to a small force of the military may be necessary in going
through a bad section- the cost of traveling through the Tibetan areas is
considerably reduced.

The Tibetan people among whom the trading is being done often move the
freight, but the traders usually bring their own transport animals. The yak-ox
is the traditional beast of burden in Tibet; and commercial caravans are
generally composed of numbers of this hybrid ox, which is a cross between the
yak and the ordinary cow.  These animals form an important item in the
export trade from the Tibetan country; they are sold both for caravans and
for agricultural operations along the border and in the Chinese regions.  A
good ox will carry a load of about two hundred pounds at an average rate of
fifteen miles a day and can live off the country, except during the last months
of winter and the period before the new grass is well up in the early part of
the summer.

Travel routine requires getting as early a start as possible- the camp is
roused long before dawn and should be leaving by daybreak, the new camp is made
and the cattle unloaded and turned loose to graze by noon.  In stores and
bad weather, plenty of which can be found on the high steppe, it is a hard
life.  For two men to handle the loading and driving of twenty oxen means
spurts of back-breaking, heart-bursting activity.  In safe country with
favorable weather, there is a certain freedom and thrill- even gaiety- in
Tibetan travel, and the traders who do much of it confess to a keen longing for
the excitement of the
trail.

Travel through the Tibetan country necessitates securing the permission and
good will of the tribesmen, and this is done through the various hosts that are
claimed in each tribe by the leaders of the "kettles.  " When a
caravan reaches a tribe it breaks up, each group going to its particular
host.  The same caravan may never be reassembled, for the various traders
have different interests or different routes and form new caravans with
whatever companions they may find as they wander through the country as
visitors and strangers.  The traders have no particular rights except as
guests of their various hosts In the tribe.  This "guest-host" relationship
is of varying degrees of cordiality, ranging all the way from a life-long warm
and intimate friendship to a very casual and mercenary association whereby
the "guest" makes a gift to his "host" and receives certain privileges and
recognized status in the community.  However varying the degree of
friendliness involved, the arrangement has an aspect of permanency, for it is
expected that the contact will be renewed at each successive opportunity. When
going through territory the traders are careful to look up their hosts and leave
gifts at each tent, even when they do not expect to stop.

This relationship is initiated usually by an introduction through a mutual
friend, but occasionally it is the result of casual contact.  A
reference or a message sent by word of mouth through the guide who takes
the caravan on may suffice for an introduction.  The trade caravan, or
party, camps either within the circle of the encampment, or outside but close to
the tent of the host.  As soon as camp is made the members of the party
adjourn to the tent of the host to have a meal (which may vary in amplitude
according to the cordiality of the relationship) and to present the gift which
is always covered with the "scarf of felicity"- a special token in the form of a
-small white, or light blue, silken scarf which is the polite, congratulatory,
social gesture that must accompany every gift.  Indeed, the scarf of
felicity is enclosed in every letter and is exchanged whenever the two meet
on any occasion of-social significance.

If the tie between the host and his guests is a close one, he gives them a
sheep to kill (they always give back the skin of that sheep) and sees that they
are supplied with the first bucket of water needed for their cookery, with
clobbered milk and other such delicacies during their stay, and with the fuel
they need.  The other extreme-the minimum-of such attention, is to
-supply the first bucket of water and one basket of fuel as a -sort of token
payment of the debt, after which the guests look after their own needs.
Whatever the degree of friendliness In the host-guest relationship (easily
determined from the material benefits granted during the stay at the tent door
as well as by all the more personal contacts and intercourse), in one respect
that relationship functions without variance.  The host I o always the
sponsor of hi a guests.  Tb a great extent they carryon trade with the rest
of the tribe through him.  In cases of dispute they appeal to him, and they
are definitely under his protection.  He al so helps them make trade
contacts, may even take them with him to the various encampments of the tribe,
and act as sort of advertising agent for them; when the time comes to go on he
either goes himself or makes arrangements for hiring the guides and
escort.  The traders on the other hand, are supposed to give him
-somewhat preferred rates on any merchandise he wants, and I f they have to hi
re transportation they first find out whether he has any animals to hire before
seeking transport elsewhere.

The trading itself is the very ultimate in haggling and bargaining, with all
the intricacies of Oriental concern with quality, quantity, and payment
involved.  Most of the trade is on the basis of immediate payment, although
between those who have considerable mutual confidence some is done on a credit
basis.  Much of the payment is in goods, making it seem like barter, but
there is little true barter of article for article without filing the
price; for even though no "money" changes hands-catties of butter are the small
change, and ounces of silver or fractions thereof, are the larger units of
value-nevertheless the goods bought and the goods in which payment is made are
both translated into terms of those two units of value.  The use of butter
as the recognized unit of value in nomad land is an index of the great, if not
supreme, importance of that article in the subsistence economy of the
region.

A general list of imports into Tibetan country included cotton cloth of
various grades, coarse silks, chiefly for girdles and the scarfs used such as
needles, thread, and colored cord, satins and brocades, pots and kettles, rifles
and ammunition, fine artesian leather brought from Mongolia, and luxury
foodstuffs such as dried ju-jubes, rice, sugar, raisins, and wheat flour.
Grain for food is imported in large quantities, and barley is the one item which
is never carried by the traders going into the Tibetan country, but is secured
by the Tibetans themselves when they go down to the border to trade.  Tea
is an import that is in a class by itself.  It is not a luxury but a
necessity and constitutes a specialized trade, with a procedure and routine
of its own; as it does not enter Tibet from this part of the border, however, it
need not concern us in our consideration of Tibetan trade.

The principal exports are cattle (beeves for work animals and breeding
stock), sheep, horses--there is a specialized large-scale trade in cavalry
mounts for the Chinese army, as well as trade in mares for the mule- breeding
areas of central China- wool, hides, furs, yak tails, salt, and to a more
limited degree felts. -sheepskins, and yak-hair Cloth for the use of those
traders who must keep up caravans and maintain pack saddle equipment and
tents.  Hartshorn and musk also form two relatively small but valuable
items of export.

The Tibetan expeditions that go to the border are organized on much the same
pattern as the Moslem trade caravans, but there are minor variations.
Most frequently a caravan is composed of representatives of the tents of an
encampment, who are grouped into "kettles" according to convenience and
considerations of friendship; but this arrangement is by no means binding, for
friends or relatives who live in different encampments may unite to form a
caravan, ignoring the encampment caravan.  Practically every tent at
sometime during the season has a representative in a trade caravan. once in a
while, when a family is very small and poor or is in particular trouble, the
people of a tent will ask a friend or two to drive some of their cattle for them
and do the trading for them.  The trade caravan never includes
representatives of more than one tribe.  Thus all the members have the same
general set of feuds and avoidances to keep in mind, leaving only personal or
encampment feuds to complicate the situation.

Once the Tibetan trade caravan is organized it is a more closely
integrated and cohesive unit than the Moslem caravan.  I have traveled
with both and have always found the degree of cooperation, the almost
instinctive discipline and unity of action much greater in the Tibetan
caravan.  This is quite consistent with the greater force of the communal
ideal as against that of individualism in their social organization.  The
tradition Is that a Tibetan trade caravan never breaks up until it has returned
to the point of origin, one member's trouble or delay meaning trouble and delay
for all. The caravan does not break up into separate units when arriving at a
Moslem village but makes one camp, although the members may claim separate hosts
among the inhabitants of the village.

There are other differences between the Moslem and Tibetan trade
caravans than the differences in the length of time spent away from home
and in their organization.  One is in the schedule of their trade journeys
within the round of the year's activities.  As the Moslem trade
venture is less a matter of community necessity and more a matter of individual
initiative, it is organized with little regard to the agricultural routine in
the village; rather is it scheduled on the basis of conditions within the
Tibetan country.  Midwinter is the preferred time for the start; at that
time the winter' s catch of furs is pretty well in, and the spring yield of
lambskins will soon be ready.  Salt can only be transported during the dry
winter, and there is always a certain amount of pressure upon the Tibetans to
dispose of the stocks of wool and hides before the problems of spring
moving become acute.  Thus some of the Moslem traders plan on a quick trip
of just a few months, getting back to the border before the deep snows of late
spring and the rains of the summer; others plan to stay over through the
summer.  The late spring or early summer is the best time to buy horses and
cattle; any kind of ox or horse looks good when carrying the flesh from a whole
summer's good grazing, but it is only when they are thin from the rigors of the
winter that the good and bad points stand out.  Also, the degree to which
they have stood the winter offers a good indication of the degree to which they
possess that elusive but very real thing the Tibetans call "bone"-constitutional
hardihood.  Unless the caravan plans to stay over an entire season (and
some even remain in the Tibetan country for two years or more), the traders try
to get back in the early fall so as to be home when the nomads come down to
trade.  It may be said here that the fall or early winter is the best time
to travel in the Tibetan country.  The cold comes early, but the weather is
dry.  There is an abundance of dry fuel cow dung and dried sheep
manure- and the frosted hay is much better fodder than the deceptive green grass
of the early summer.  Also the bogs are frozen, and there are no horse
flies to stampede the cattle.

The schedule for the Tibetan trade caravan's journey is strictly
limited.  It must be undertaken while the tribe is in the winter
encampment, for the routine of moving in the summer requires both the oxen and
the men, and the summer camp sites are usually farther away from the farming
country and the border.  Also it must be before the cattle are weakened by
the privations of the winter and while the grazing is still sufficiently
good to keep them in shape while carrying heavy loads.  Finally, it must be
while the sheep and beeves, which are the principal livestock commodity for the
foodstuffs trade of the nomads, are fat and in condition to be butchered. The
caravan period is thus limited to a few months in the fall and early
winter.  It cannot be too early, for the caravan roads will not be open to
great droves of cattle until the crops of the Tibetan farming country lying on
the route have been harvested; furthermore it is only after the harvests are in,
in the Chinese country and surplus grain stocks are high that the Moslem village
folk are ready to trade grain foodstuffs.

The time involved is short; the Tibetans are always anxious to finish their
trading and get back for the mid winter festivities in the lamaseries.
Then, too, the farming country-even though stocks of straw and -such fodder may
be available-is no place to maintain a yak caravan for any length of time.
It is-seldom, therefore, that a Tibetan trade caravan 'Will-stay in the Moslem
community for longer than two or three weeks.  The Tibetan always makes
much less effort to adjust himself to the tempo of life in a Moslem village
under Chinese law than does the Moslem trader to the Tibetan encampment,
for the latter stays much longer and is in more intimate association with
Tibetan life.

There is another fundamental difference between the Moslem and the Tibetan
trade caravans, and that is in the commodities carried for exchange.  The
trading done by the Tibetan caravans is in a sense a simpler kind, springing
from the basic need of all life.  It is the immediate exchange of a
percentage of an exclusively protein and fats food supply for enough grain to
make a suitable diet.  This, in-spite of the fact that the yield of butter
from the flocks and herds, which is the most obvious return from the
exploitation of the one basic source of wealth in nomad land grass does not
figure in the exchange for grain at the border.  Surplus stocks of butter
constitute the medium of exchange among the Tibetan themselves and are paid out
for services and the working expenses of caring for the herds so that livestock,
hides, and wool from those herds may be converted into grain at the
border.  Thus the trade caravans of the Tibetans which go to Moslem farming
communities are engaged in a basic and imperative foodstuffs exchange.

The trade of the Moslem caravans which go to the encampments of the Tibetan
nomads is a much more complicated matter.  It is based on certain demands
of the Chinese and even of world markets and is motivated by a desire for the
gain to be derived from the middleman function in the movement of regional
products from one place to another.  In a sense it is a luxury trade,
depending partly on arousing desires among the Tibetans for cloth, silk, luxury
foodstuffs, arms, and ornaments.  A favorable trade balance often enables
the Tibetans to start for their foodstuff exchange with an extra stake or
reserve of silver or other wealth; much of this wealth from the sale of horses,
furs, etc., however, as well as the luxury goods taken in, is stored in the
lamaseries or otherwise accumulated in individual hoards. Expansion of the trade
is dependent upon an increasing sophistication of the Tibetans and an increasing
demand for all kinds of notions.

The effects of this diversified, yet sharply controlled, contact are
discernable in both culture groups.  These effects on both Moslems and
nomadic Tibetans are most clearly, attributable to diffused influence
alone, for the contact is not only reciprocal but is maintained through selected
agents.  No population pressure is involved, nor does political pressure or
aggression enter into the situation.  Prestige is Involved but it is
somewhat equalized, being on the side of Tibetan culture when the contact
takes place where Tibetan tribal custom and usage obtain and on the side of
Moslem culture when it takes place in the Moslem villages.

The effects of this contact are to be found in two aspects of the Tibetan
nomad population: on the population as a whole and on the selected individuals
who make the visits to the Moslem villages and trade centers of the
border.  Exponents of Moslem culture are pretty well diffused
throughout the Tibetan communities by the prolonged stay of the traders in
intimate and leisurely contact with the Tibetans.  The degree to which
the general population acquires certain traits as a result of this process is
greatly accentuated in those individuals who make the annual trade visit to the
centers of that culture.  There for a brief time they are exposed to a
relatively intensive form of culture influence.  The results of this
process in both its diffused and intensive forms appear in a number of
ways.  Unquestionably the Tibetans owe much of their knowledge of the
outside world to the Moslem influence.  The Tibetan language has not
yet been modified to allow of proper terminology to describe civilization, but
the people talk about planes and tanks, speaking of them respectively as "iron
birds" and "iron cattle." The traders tell their hosts and friends the news of
the outside world and introduce them to a consideration of things far removed
from the round of camp life.  These traders are also the agents of
-sophistication; they introduce tastes for luxuries in the matter of foods and
persuade the tent-dwellers to buy flashlights and cotton cloth.  Older
Tibetans have told me that fifty years ago no Tibetan ever needed Cloth; now,
though the nomads haven't followed the Choni Tibetans in the adoption of
trousers, there is a distinct tendency towards an increased use of cloth, both
for trimming the borders of the big -sheepskin coats and for shirts and
jackets.

Because of this contact certain words of obvious Chinese (Moslem) origin have
come into general use among the Tibetans of the steppe.  Such words, as in
the case of the language borrowings by the sedentary Tibetans, have been changed
to harmonize phonetically with Tibetan, and the distinctive Chinese tones
attached to each syllable have been dropped.  The following is a sample
list of words which have been so borrowed (many other instances of borrowing are
identical with those we have already noted along the border). As to Chinese
itself, it is but seldom that the nomads ever learn more than a few words of
it.

There is one notion current among the Tibetans which obviously comes from
observance of the eating-habits of the Moslems, especially their refusal to
eat meat that has not been killed by a believer of Islam.  In different
parts of the Tibetan country there are varying prejudices in regard to food,
some foods being distasteful to certain of the Tibetans: for some, mushrooms;
for many more, eggs, marmots, fish, fowl, etc.  Birds are not popular in
the Tibetan diet because of the association between their claws and those of
vultures which have such a prominent part in the final disposal of the Tibetan
dead, but this religious prejudice seems to have no country-wide
distribution.  Marmots, which the Tibetans of one district think of
with the greatest abhorrence area highly appreciated treat to others.  The
symbolic use of the word "kha" (mouth) is not applied to such differences of
usage and taste, but the Tibetans do have a notion that certain fundamental
differences exist between the food for people of one religion and that for
people of another religion, and when they hear about other peoples the question
is always asked: "Is their mouth the same as ours, or is it like the mouth of
the Moslems, or do they have some other mouth?"

The influence of Tibetan culture, on the other hand, is not so widely
diffused throughout the Moslem community.  The stay-at-homes and the
womenfolk of the Moslems have very little direct contact with the Tibetans;
whatever influence Tibetan culture has upon them comes to them through their own
traders and depends upon the degree to which these selected members of the
community have responded to Tibetan cultural influences and acquired Tibetan
traits.  As leaders of the community- they are usually its wealthiest
members- these traders are able to make certain habits and traits the
vogue.  They undergo a more intensive exposure to the Tibetan manner of
life than do Tibetan traders to a Moslem community and become remarkably
Tibetanized in many things.  Certain it is that much of the ready response
to danger and the flair for decisive action that characterize the nomadic
Tibetan strikes a responsive chord in the nature of the Moslem.  Maybe it
is that he, too, by heritage, is a nomad, though many times removed; and that
the call of a nomadic existence is still potent for him.  The Moslem
villages which have been most in contact with the Tibetans are most likely to
resort to arms to defend themselves against the recurrent scourge of
banditry.  In the year 1914 it was the fighting traders of the Moslem
community of Taochow Old City who administered the first defeat the great
Chinese bandit, White Wolf, had ever known up to that time.  The traders
not only acquire a fondness for Tibetan clothing and saddlery and adopt Tibetan
travel equipment in its entirety, but when at home they like to showoff
their Tibetan boots and great fur hats and talk in a half-Tibetan lingo for the
admiration of the home-town folks- they parade Tibetan words the way the sailors
who had sailed with Drake mixed Spanish with English when they talked in
Biddleford town.  They all, of course, speak Tibetan fluently, though
most of them speak it with a marked accent.

Naturally, there has resulted a considerable amount of language
borrowing.  Some of it has been an outright borrowing of words, with
the usual modifications of consonant and vowel quality common in such
borrowings, plus, in this case, the addition of tones to make the words of
non-tonal Tibetan fit into their Moslem-Chinese speech.  Some borrowings
have been more subtle; for example, a Chinese word will be reinterpreted
according to the delimitations or connotations of its nearest Tibetan
equivalent.  Herewith are listed a few of the many Tibetan words which have
been incorporated into the language usage of the traders, and to a lesser
degree, into the language usage of their home communities.

Then, of course, the various words for cheese, tether rope, etc. which have
been borrowed from Tibetan by the Chinese along the border, as listed in an
earlier part of this paper, are used in the same way by these people.

I shall give, also, a few examples of the more subtle borrowings of Tibetan
connotations and meanings: the Tibetans have one word, mthso, for lake
and sea, which with a prefix signifying bigness, is also used for ocean.
The traders, of course, hear mthso used for the salt lakes and for all
the lakes of the Tibetan country, yet know that it really means sea and ocean as
well, so they have taken to using the Chinese word hat in a new broader sense
for lake, sea, and ocean, and have discarded the more particular words hu
and ch'i even when speaking of a very small pond. This is clearly an
instance of borrowing the system of classification of another language and using
it in one's own language with words of one's own language.

The use of the word "kettle" to designate a group of men- those who share a
single campfire- is a case of borrowing a Tibetan connotation and fixing it to
the Chinese word of nearest meaning.  The Tibetan call such a wa-ka
(kettle-at); so the traders, if they do not borrow the Tibetan term, affect the
Tibetan connotation for the Chinese word kuo-tre (kettle), a
connotation it never had in the Chinese original.

The experiences and influences of Tibetan trade and travel seem also to have
modified the truculence and religious intolerance of the Moslems, for those
Moslem communities which have had much trade and contact with the Tibetans are
not so bigoted as their co-religionists of the Hochow district.

One more result of this contact should be mentioned.  During their
rather extended periods of residence in the Tibetan country, many of the Moslem
traders take temporary Tibetan wives, and those who do not have numerous sexual
affairs with the free and easy Tibetans.  Unquestionably this has had some
influence upon the population of the nomad tribes and may have had a part in
creating the puzzling mixture of types often found among the Tibetans.
Once in a while a Moslem trader will even take his Tibetan wife back to his
home and make her his principal wife, thus bringing further Tibetan influence
into his home and to the community an added source of racial admixture.

In this third instance of culture contact we have two groups which are
different in race, religion, language, and occupation, and which are not
contiguous but removed from each other by considerable distances as judged by
slow caravan travel.  Yet the needs growing out of the subsistence
economy of the one group and the commercial stimulus exerted upon the other
by their peculiarly advantageous position on or near the frontier have produced
a strong trade movement, carried on by variously selected agents in a regular
seasonal cycle.  The contact established through these agents and this
trade has been sufficient to produce marked variations and changes in each of
the two groups involved and furnishes an opportunity for the study of a closely
controlled example of race and culture contact.

V. THE SEDENTARY AND NOMADIC TIBETANS

The culture contact between the sedentary and the nomadic Tibetan's is the
fourth of such contacts with which we are concerned.  The distribution of
these two groups as it appears on a map suggests no orderly factors underlying
their relative positions, but in terms of elevation and the accompanying
zoning of climatic conditions and plant life the distribution is quite
regular.  The chan-tang, the high "cold plain" the central
Tibetan plateau, is mostly uninhabited; even the hardiest of the "dwellers
in the black tents" cannot live at altitudes of 16,000 feet and more.
Eastward from this highest table-land-now in wide, sloping plains, now in
abrupt, broken country, mountainous and rough-the land falls away to the steppe
country where the various Shim-drok and Wa-nak tribes of nomads are found.
Only a part of the nomad range is in the ideal steppe country; following
the drainage of the many rivers, the steppe breaks up into mountainous
country, with more or less rounded contours covered over with varieties of
steppe grasses.  Along the courses of these rivers, as they cut further
into the Plateau, the country finally changes; the valleys become deep
sided-canyons with steep, partly-wooded walls.  At about the level of the
first forests, from elevations of 11,000 feet and under, agriculture takes the
place of cattle and sheep-raising, and one moves from the region of the nomads
into the country of the sedentary faming tribes of this part of Tibet.

There are many variations of and exceptions to, the typical conditions as
here described.  Particularly in the Bo-ra and Am-chok region, the
villages of the faming peoples are found in country which, although it is
low enough for faming, is more like the true steppe than like the valley bottoms
of the Tibetan farms.  In spite of all the exceptions that can be
mentioned, "steppe" and "valley" describe two peoples and two conditions of
life.  The Tibetan term for nomad's drok-pa (drok-open
country, steppe, free from forest and not precipitous; pa- a particle
signifying relationship or participation).  The term for a sedentary
individual is rong-pa (rong- valley, and, by later
usage, cultivated valley).  Other names, chief of which are the terms
"People of the black tents" and "people of the earthen houses," are also used to
designate those who are nomadic or sedentary, pastoral or agricultural.

The drainage slope of the country on the whole is toward the east, and as we
go toward the Chinese frontier typical nomad country gradually gives way to more
level land, suitable for farming.  Along the border, with the exception of
one or two isolated bits of table-land and high mountainous country, there are
found only sedentary tribes of Tibetans.

The special nomadic culture of the various Wa-nak and Shim-drok tribes
occupies a belt of country extending north and south which coincides with the
best portion of the typical and near-typical steppe country.  All these
tribes are very much alike in culture despite the fact that in the north there
is a considerable admixture of Mongol influence-some of the tribes are called
Mongol, and one or two of them speak Mongolian.  Various travelers have
called them all by one name- Drowka- assuming it to be a tribal name, whereas it
really designates a manner of life.  To the west of these various tribes,
who number about thirty all told, in the higher and more inaccessible or
inhospitable country, are to be found the eighteen tribes of the Goloks-
"round-heads"- who differ to a very considerable extent in physical
characteristics, cultural traits, and linguistic usage.  They are
easily distinguished from the Shim-drok tribes by certain linguistic habits
which would seem to indicate that they have migrated recently from central
Tibet, and by certain physical differences which may be due to difference of
stock or may be the result of greater privation and the effects of attitude.

We are defining as typical nomad culture that which characterizes the tribes
of the Shim-drok who are least exposed to influences from the sedentary
districts.  In the matter of ideals, language usage, and habits of dress
there is a set of patterns definitely ascribed to the nomads by the Tibetans-
both nomad and sedentary- and by the Moslem and Chinese traders who have come in
contact with both peoples. (Golok culture is much like typical nomad culture but
shows great enough variation so that it would probably warrant separate mention
if it were included in this part of the paper.  My acquaintance with the
Goloks, however, has not been of sufficient range or duration to furnish
material for a comparison with the other type of Tibetan culture.)

The sedentary communities that we are taking as representative of the farming
peoples of northeastern Tibet are similar to, but not identical with, the
farming communities of the Choni district which are changing under the impact of
Chinese culture, reinforced by population pressure.  The farming
communities farther from the border are somewhat removed from Chinese
influence and offer a better basis for comparing the strictly Tibetan culture of
the sedentary people with the strictly Tibetan culture of the nomads.
Indeed, some of those communities comprise the sedentary half of tribes which
have both nomadic and sedentary, sections, and thus they constitute an ideal
basis of comparison.  Certain basic traits link the people of the Labrang,
Hehtse, Amchek, Samtsa, Shes-tsang, and Te-bu districts; all are known as
rong-pa and live in valley levels below the grazing country of the
mountains and the true steppe.

Fundamentally the steppe people and the valley people differ only in
location.  In race, religion, and language they are the same or so nearly
similar that the absolute sense of the word requires but little
qualification.  Both sedentary peoples and nomads present the same
physical characteristics.  In the recorded craniological measurements
of Tibetans there have been found two types, variously designated as type A and
type B or as "warrior type" and "priestly type," but I have found no mention of
any distinction on the basis of nomadic and sedentary. (Rockhill does,
however, claim for the "Drug-pa" tribe the purest strain of Tibetan racial
characteristics, but he is evidently speaking about nomads, using the
Tibetan word "nomad" as a tribal designation.) Much as the nomads hate being
classed with the sedentary peoples in any way, the Tibetans regard themselves as
one People- the Bod- which includes both groups.  Different conditions of
life and diet have resulted in some variations in physique and a predisposition
or resistance to certain diseases.

In religion the two peoples are also similar; to much the same degree both
are fervently devoted to the same branch and kind of Buddhism.  There are
some slight variations: the sedentary people appear to be more completely
under the domination of the lamaseries and are more meticulous in the observance
and performance of all the religious duties incident to Lamaism.  Also
among them there is a much greater amount of animism- the still active residue
of the ancient Bon religion of Tibet- than among the nomads. In Reb-kong and
Te-kok, the most typical sedentary districts of Amdo, are found the headquarters
of two branches of the "sorcerer sect," and the People of the valleys, the
rong-wa, are the most devout of all the Tibetans.  An
agricultural routine and subsistence economy, with the ritual demands of
plowing, seeding, and harvest, together with the recurrent threat of hail or
drought, have stimulated a greater interest in the purely magical aspects of
religion.  From the persistence of the older forms of religion (there are
many survivals not only of Bon religious activity but of the older, unreformed
Red sect of lamaism, as distinguished from the reformed or Yellow sect founded
by Tsong-ka-ba in the twelfth century) it might be possible to infer that
agricultural routine tended to foster religious conservatism.

It cannot be said, however, that agricultural routine has fostered linguistic
conservatism.  The nomadic and sedentary Tibetans can always understand
each other, but there are marked dialectic differences in the language spoken
among the drok-pa and that spoken among the rong-pa-
so marked that both the Tibetans themselves and the Moslems and Chinese who are
in contact with them distinguish two dialects for most of northeastern Tibet-
drok-skad, or the language of the drok-pa; and rong-skad,
or the language of the rong-pa.  If the Tibetan system of spelling
and the evidences of Tibetan phonology are to be trusted, the greater
departure and change has been in the rong-skad, the
drok-skad, or speech of the nomads, adhering more closely to the
sound values current in Tibetan when it was reduced to writing in the seventh
century.  The brother of the Panchen Lama who until his death last
year(1937) was the highest in the lamaist system when he was on the
Chinese-Tibetan border about to return to central Tibet, made this same
statement in so many words: "The drok-skad of Amdo sounds much
like bod-skad sounded when it was first written. Our dialect of
central Tibet has changed very much."

When the Tibetan and Indian scholars of the seventh century took over many of
the grammatical constructions of Sanskrit and adapted an alphabet from that
language, the language of Tibet must have presented many consonantal
prefixes, together with superscribed or subjoined consonants.  This
resulted in some of the fearsome transcription of initial sounds in Tibetan
dictionaries, such as brgy, bsky, mgr, tg, gch, gs, lng, sbr, and any number of
other such difficult mouthfuls.  According to Dr. Laufer's researches in
"Tibetan Phonology of the Ninth Century," many of these consonantal
combinations had gone out of usage in the Lhasa dialect as spoken in the
ninth century.  From the descriptions of language usage by Sir Charles
Bell, the Reverend Graham, and Chandra Das, it would seem that at the present
time the prefixed consonants are not indicated in any way in the spoken language
of central Tibet, and many if not most of the final consonants have either been
dropped entirely, modified to an unarticulated stop, or permitted to modify
the quality of the vowel preceding.  Along with these changes there has
appeared a greater nicety in the matter of tones, it having become necessary to
use tones to distinguish words of the same sound that were once distinguished by
the endings or the consonantal prefixes.  With the loss of consonantal
combinations and endings and a gain in the attention paid to somewhat arbitrary
tones there has come about, or perhaps it would be better to say there has
been retained, a careful distinction between the five vowels of the
language.  All this is exactly what I observed in the small amount of the
Lhasa dialect that I have heard.

One or two of the variations of the nomadic dialect that I have heard have
preserved most of the value of the prefixed and super-added consonants. The
pronunciation of such combinations as brgy is a remarkable performance.
But the mean of nomad usage has been content to indicate the presence of these
prefixed and super-added consonants by half-pronounced consonants, or by
variations of breathing, etc., preceding the main initial consonant.  Most,
if not all, of the final consonants are pronounced at least partially, but the
use of tones is very unobtrusive and the three vowels i, u, and a have all
become centralized until there is very little difference.  Whether that is
true of early Tibetan we have no way of knowing; but if the drok-skad
usage has preserved more of the consonant values as they were first written, it
is reasonable to suppose that the same holds good for vowel values.

We give here a comparative chart of the drok-skad and
rong-skad pronunciation of the cardinals up to ten against
the Tibetan spelling transcribed according to standard usage as found in
the dictionaries.  For further comparison it would be well to have the
Lhasa pronunciation, but my recollection of what I have heard of that dialect is
not sufficient to attempt a transcription, and I have not been able to find a
close phonetic transcription of the Lhasa dialect.  From what Sir Charles
Bell says about Tibetan pronunciation in general and from some of the arbitrary
renderings in his English-Tibetan dictionary, it would seem that the
rong-skad more nearly approaches the Lhasa form than does the
drok-skad.

In giving drok-skad usage I have tried to give what would be a
rather widely accepted mean rather than any extreme (one or two tribes that I
know pronounce practically every part of the consonant combinations).  The
above is only a sample, but in the ten words which through their position in the
language form such a good index there are fortunately illustrated a number of
the more important consonantal and vowel differences in the two dialects.

By the three criteria of race, religion, and language, these two Tibetan
groups exhibit real differences but of so inconsiderable magnitude that we are
not warranted in using them as our basis for differentiating between the
cultures of the two groups.  For, after all, these dissimilarities
reflect the action, and in themselves are part of the result, of
differentiation- they do not constitute that differentiation.  Nor can
differences of social or political organization be adduced as reasons or calling
the cultures different.  The family occupies much the position in the
social structure of both the drok-pa and the
rong-pa. Among both, the village (and we use the term in its
broader sense, as defining a unit of organization) is the essential unit of
organization.  Among the farmers the people live in a group of houses in
the midst of their fields; the real village, however, is not the aggregate of
the dwellings but the conscious organization of the people into a closely
integrated unit.  Among the nomads the ring of tents, shifted from campsite
to campsite as pasturage needs require, is still the "village" and the most
cohesive and powerful unit in the Tibetan political and social structure.
The Tibetan word for village, de-wa, is sometimes used for
encampment (there is, however, a special word for encampment,
ru-sker- tent circle), and in asking a nomad what his home
community is, one always refers to his de-wa.  As there are
linguistic links connecting the words for village and for encampment, so there
are similar links connecting the various terms for tent and house.  The
common word for house is khang-ba, but khyim is used for
the important living-room of the house.  The words for tent are wa,
ru, and nak-thsang (nest or den), and the tents of the Goloks
are called nak (black) thsang (nest).  The word for household
in use among both the nomads and the sedentary peoples is khyim
(house) and thsang (tent); thus, khyim-thsang.

The village organization is generally an informal one.  Among the
farmers there is a tendency to have a properly chosen head-man; but among the
nomads, although there is usually one person in the encampment who is known as
the head-man by right of his influence, it is seldom that he has been chosen
formally.  The real power and final court of appeal is found in the group
of substantial middle-aged and elderly men known as the elders (rang-po),
and their word is final in village affairs.  Villages- whether villages in
the restricted sense, like those of the sedentary districts, or in the larger
sense which includes the encampments of the nomads are associated in groups
that have common territorial interests.

Frequently the faming villages that are so organized have claims to one
valley from its source to where it joins a larger one, or they may occupy a
segment of some larger valley.  Encampments so organized maintain not only
rights of residence in certain sites but also all grazing-privileges in
their territory or range.  In a number of instances a group of villages and
a group of encampments form the two halves of a single tribe, and in at least
one instance the territories of the two halves are not contiguous but are
separated by a strip of territory belonging to another tribe.

The tribes vary in organization and the form of control.  Some of the
tribes- notably some of the smaller ones- have no chief; all matters of policy
are decided by a council of elders somewhat analogous to the encampment
council. The members of this tribal council have no special title but are also
known simply as the rgan-po (the aged ones).  Nor is
participation determined by any formal election; by common consent the
leading mean men of each encampment attend.

Still others of the tribes have chiefs whose offices are hereditary.
The power of the chief varies greatly, depending on the tradition of the tribe,
the ability of his predecessors, and on his own gifts and resources.  In
some tribes the position of chief is little more than an empty title, the real
power of control and administration being entirely in the hands of the
rgan-po.  At the other extreme are tribes in which the chief
is all powerful because he is the able scion of able forebears; the
rgan-po is here nothing more than an advisory group, whose
function is to nod assent to the orations of the chief.  Yet even such
autocratic control is sharply limited, not by any competing body of power, but
by the individualism and hatred of arbitrary restraint which are very strong In
the Tibetans.

There are also tribes who have no chiefs but are ruled by the lamaseries to
which they belong.  In such a case the lamasery functions toward the group
in two ways.  It has a general religious influence and taps the people for
contributions and fees, in return for which it undertakes to neutralize the evil
effects of all the malignant influences in the region, to maintain itself an a
gathering-point offering constant religious opportunity to the
religious-minded, and to celebrate for the benefit of all the inhabitants so
linked to it the many religious festivals designated in the religious
calendar.  In this general way the lamasery is related to all.
Secondly, the lamasery, through its leaders acts as ruler for certain
tribes.  Lamasery rule tends to be autocratic, and, in general, the role
played by the rgan-po in determining policy is a smaller one when
a lamasery is the ruler than when a chief is the head of the tribe.  Some
of the lamaseries, in addition to exercising control over the population
which has gathered immediately around the lamasery, have been able to extend
their power in varying degrees over entire groups of tribes, ultimately either
superseding the chief s or reducing them to a very subordinate position.
There are many tribes and chiefs, however, who have most successfully resisted
such ecclesiastical domination.

There are two tribes which, to my knowledge, are different from most of the
tribes of northeastern Tibet in structure and organization.  In the case of
other tribes encampments are the only units within the tribes, but in these two
tribes there is an intermediate organization called the thsu-ba. In
one of these tribes the encampments are organized in twelve divisions- the
thsu-ba- according to the valleys in which their winter campsites
are located.  These twelve divisions have recognized leaders or head-men
whose offices are hereditary and who exercise considerable power; but all are
under the one chief who is concurrently the head of his own
thsu-ba and the unquestioned chief of the entire tribe.
Incidentally, he is one of the most powerful and autocratic chiefs in the nomad
country. From all indication these thsu-ba were once tribes but
were reduced to a subordinate position: they are no longer called rgyud-
tribes- but are merely parts of a tribe.  Such a tribe would seem to
illustrate one of the stages in the formation of a state.  The other has
fewer thsu-ba; they are more independent of the chief and so more resemble a
confederacy than the beginnings of a state.  Among the tribes of this part
of Amdo are also found confederations or associations of tribes, which are
banded together for the carrying out of certain aims and objectives.  Such
leagues are more permanent than mere temporary alliances of tribes to carryout
particular military operations against a common enemy.

Lastly there are three chiefs in northeastern Tibet whose power and control
have been so extended through the absorption of lesser tribes and the attracting
of refugee groups by exercising patronage and diplomacy combined with military
prowess, that they are no longer called ngo-ba- chief (literally
the head one)- but are called by the Tibetans rgyal-po, or king; in their
dealings with the Chinese, they have been grudgingly called by them wang
-king.

In no instance do the Tibetans pay any sort of regular taxes.  If war is
determined, levies on the economic resources are voted or decided upon by the
rgan-po and the ngo-ba.  If peace is made, all
share in bearing the expenses of conference and treaty-making.  The chief
or leader derives no direct material benefit from his position except as
position and influence give him unusual opportunity to amass wealth.  There
is no such thing as a standing army nor are there any paid public
officials.  Even the individuals required to handle affairs for the chief
or ruler act as his personal retainers, and he may either pay them, or what
is more likely, place in their way opportunities to profit in trade or
war.  On the other hand, fines imposed as penalties are generally
regarded as belonging to the chief; it is he who has been wronged, not any
abstract rules that have been broken.  A crime is determined byte position
of the one against whom it is committed.  Robbery of a stranger is
laudable; robbery of another Tibetan is serious only if he is powerful and has
great prestige; robbery of a chief may be a life-and-death matter; and robbery
of some great living Buddha would mean almost certain death.  All matter of
punishment is further complicated by the difficulty of inflicting it; for the
right of refuge is inviolate, and simply by fleeing to another tribe a criminal
can gain safety.

These facts as to Tibetan social and political life apply equally to nomadic
and sedentary peoples.  There is nothing in political life, as there is
nothing in the essential aspects of race, religion, or language, to
differentiate between the two groups or divisions; yet the
drok-pa and the rong-pa are sharply set apart in
what, for want of a term more closely definitive, may well be called two
cultures.  Fundamentally, then, the two are distinguished by location, the
nomads occupying the grazing country and the sedentary Tibetans living in the
farming valleys.  Their cultures are different because the subsistence
economy of the one group is entirely different from that of the other.
That difference finds expression not only in such matters as dwellings,
occupational technique, and routine, but in different standards of behavior,
avoidances, taboos, and general outlook on life, as well.

A typical village of the rong-pa-  "the people of the
earthen houses''- may number anywhere from a dozen to seventy or eighty
families, and is located in the midst of the arable land belonging to the
members of the village.  Grazing-land and forest belong to the village
commune, but the fields are owned privately by the families, as are the houses
and house sites.  All members of the village may graze their cattle and
sheep without restriction in the communal meadows and may gather firewood
without stint from the community forests, although the taking of lumber for
building purposes or sale is subject to restriction by the village as a
whole.  Such restriction is well illustrated by the regulation in one of
the Jangtsa villages whereby any member of the village may cut and haul as much
large timber as he pleases but may not cut any saplings for grain-rack poles
until he has explained the reasonableness of his needs to the village elders and
secured their permission.

The houses are built close together and have two stories, the second story
consisting of one or two small rooms opening onto the flat roof of the larger
first story.  These rooms are called the summer rooms and during the winter
are left unoccupied.  The roofs are flat and adjoin, making, when the
village site is level, one large communal parade ground.  Even when the
village is built on sloping ground, it is possible to go all over the
village without ever getting off the roofs by using the notched log ladders
which connect the different levels.  The ground-plan of the house consists
of open stabling and woodsheds in front through which one passes into a long
entrance with stables or cattle pens on either side, at the end of this one
comes into the khyim (home), a large room with the fireplace in the
middle, lighted from a skylight which also serves as a chimney.

The grain racks, upon which the grain is laid to ripen after it has been
harvested, are set close to the house, usually immediately in front of or behind
it; the front wall or edge of the roof is piled with a huge stack of
firewood.  The odds and ends of firewood from the pile are used, and
sometimes under considerable pressure the owner will use or sell some from the
pile itself, but the real significance of the wood is as a symbol of
prestige.  The base of the pile is composed of half-sections of large logs
cut in five-foot lengths and rotted out of shape, while the top of the pile
shows the newly cut logs recently placed there.  During each slack season
in the agricultural routine, the owner of the horse works his hardest to make a
substantial addition to the pile.  In some instances there is not only a
great rampart of stacked cordwood around the front of the house but also a large
stack piled high in the nearest field of the family; it will never be used but
stands merely as a symbol of the importance of the family in the community.

The agricultural technique and routine of life, of which the "earthen houses'
in a sense are the symbol as well as an integral part-as the "black tents" are a
symbol of the nomad manner of life-involves a large amount of avoidable
drudgery.  Although they are acquainted with the wheel, the Tibetan farmers
steadfastly refuse to use it, and all the farming operations are accomplished by
using the backs of either the womenfolk or the cattle.  By the New Year the
women are already engaged in stacking the piles of manure and stable cleanings,
which in the process of decay generate considerable heat so that even in
the cold weather the change that takes place is partly a burning and partly a
rotting.  Because the Tibetans have more livestock than the Chinese farmers
and do not use stable cleanings for firing kangs, the accumulation of
manure is considerable and makes it unnecessary for the Tibetans, who have no
systematic sanitary arrangements, to utilize human excrement for
fertilizer.  As soon as the New Year's festivities are over the manure
is carried, either on cattle or on the backs of the women, to the fields and
spread.  Then at the right time in the spring, after religious ceremonies
have been performed to insure the success of the operations, the plowing is done
by the men of the village.  Each plows his own fields, but all work at the
same time on particular days, and both the men and the women (who lead the
cattle in the plowing) dress in their very best clothing, creating a festive
atmosphere.  The sowing is done in much the same way, and after the fields
are sown the entire system of community fences is repaired and warders are
appointed to protect the crops.

From this time until after the harvest the farming country is
practically closed to caravans of any size, especially caravans of
oxen.  Even small parties of horsemen may be held up and required to pay
lo-krims (year-in the sense of yield or harvest-law or fine), and if the
party has pack animals of any kind they must be led, not driven along the paths;
meanwhile the maximum amount of payment is collected, to the accompaniment
of much wrangling and verbal abuse.  Thus one aspect of the year's routine
acts to close the farming areas to any considerable amount of travel and
trade.  The wardens or guardians of the crops also keep close watch to
prevent any of the pigs or goats of the village from getting through the system
of fences.  These watchers carry swords and spears and any pigs or goats
that do get through are killed if they can be cornered.

The harvesting is done, after the proper observance of religious services, in
the same way as the plowing and seeding. Throughout the
time      the crops are growing, hail is warded away
and droughts are broken by the chanting of appropriate passages from the sacred
writings and by the carrying of all the two hundred and twenty-eight volumes of
the Buddhist scriptures around the fields by the members of the village.
The harvesting must be finished within the time it takes those with the smallest
fields to finish cutting the grain with small hand sickles.  Thus the
wealthy must hire help from other villages, even though the members of the
family could harvest without outside help if they could take their time.
There is a practical reason behind this as well as tradition: once the communal
fences have been broken down there is no more communal protection for the grain
and all must be reaped together in order that none may be stolen either by
fellow villagers or by prowlers from other villages.  Once the grain has
been cut and stacked on the racks to dry, the district is open to travel, and
lo-krims or fines are no longer collected.

The work of threshing and preparing the grain is also accomplished in a few
days.  The threshing is done with flails; the threshers work early and
late, for the grain must be roasted and ground before the winter's cold has
frozen the mill-race of the village mill.  Cultivating and weeding are done
as in Chinese territory, by a painstaking hand process; but, unlike the Chinese
custom, the women bear the entire burden of this work.

If the family does not have enough fields to supply grain for the whole year,
as soon as their grain is harvested, threshed, and milled, the home is closed
and the members of the family start off in a group on a begging expedition
throughout the district and even to other tribes.  They return home only
when the stock of grain begged, added to that grown, will see them through the
rest of the year.

In addition to feed-grain-barley, peas, and a little wheat-the Tibetans
also raise some grains from which vegetable oils are extracted and large crops
of turnips, which when dried are used for fodder and for fattening the pigs
that will be killed as part of the winter's meat.

With this short description of the routine of the farming economy of the
rong-pa, we may next consider how the activities of this basic
subsistence economy fit into the Tibetan ideas concerning the basic needs of
existence.  Those needs are summarized as clothes, food, dwelling.
The farming activities of the rong-pa contribute only indirectly
to supplying the need for clothing.  No flax or other vegetable fibre is
raised, and although some cloth is used for clothing it is purchased cotton
goods for the most part, with some homemade woolen goods.  Sheepskins and
goatskins are chiefly used and these are obtained from the nomads, as is the
wool used to make the woolen cloth.  Thus fanning supplies the wealth with
which clothing can be bought, but clothing does not come directly from the
agricultural activity.

Farming provides grain and pork, but for dairy products and other meats the
agriculturalists again have to depend on the nomads' produce, exchanging their
surplus grain for sheep, beeves, butter, and cheese.  The dwellings of the
rong-pa are not the result of any part of the faming cycle but are
entirely a matter of extraneous effort in which lumbering operations, carpenter
work, and the pounding of the earth into adobe walls &I 1 have a part.
The nomad routine and pastoral economy, on the other hand, is a more
comprehensive and more closely integrated subsistence economy, requiring less
extraneous activity to meet the needs of life.

There is a greater degree of security and comfort in the sedentary mode of
existence than in the nomad way of life.  Security in the village depends
not on any disinclination on the part of the rong-pa to-get into feuds
and trouble but on the fact that the village is less vulnerable to attack than
the encampment.  Danger may lurk in the lanes and roads close to the
villages, but is seldom that any direct attack is made on even the smallest
villages. once he is within his house the valley dweller not only has shelter
from rain and cold but can rest secure.

Since it is the subsistence economy which sets apart the two ways of life,
the routine and technique of the nomads must also receive attention.  The
typical encampment varies in size to the same degree that the village
varies.  The smallest encampment I was ever in comprised only five tents,
while the largest numbered eighty.  As the Tibetan name indicates, the
encampment- ru-sker, "tent circle"- is always in the form of a
rough circle.  This rule does not apply to the winter quarters of such
tribes as have wattle-and-fence huts, sod houses, or huts with sod walls and
tent roofs, which take the place of the tents in the winter time.  In such
a case the arrangement is much like that of a village, but when tents are used,
the form of the encampment is a circle, within which the cattle, horses, and
sheep are herded at night.

As the earthen houses are the symbol of one way of life, so, too, is the
black tent an analogous symbol of another way of life.  Indeed the forms of
tent life express more directly the social units than do the forms of house
life.  A man who has two wives (though we might point out that both
polygyny and polyandry are rather infrequent) in the faming country keeps them
both in the same house, but among the nomads the material stake-the cattle,
sheep, and horses--is divided into two parts, and the two wives, in separate
tents, manage the herds and flocks as two distinct units.  The man is
equally the owner of the wealth of both tents, as he is the husband of the two
wives, but neither wife has any interest in, or claim upon, the wealth of the
other tent.

The tent of the truly Tibetan nomadic tribes of northeastern Tibet, as
distinguished from the conical felt yurt of the Mongol tribes and the
teepee-shaped cattle-camp tents of some of the sedentary peoples, is low,
rectangular, and made of black yak-hair cloth.  There is a slight degree of
pitch to the roof, and the walls hang free from the edge of the roof like
curtains.  By an ingenious system of outside tent poles which are higher
than the tent over which the guy ropes are stretched, the tent is more or less
suspended by the edges of the roof and the corners and has only two sets of
poles in the very center, on each side of the smoke vent-about two feet
wide-which runs from front to back.  The average tent makes one heavy yak
load and the poles another, but if the tent is wet from rain it will be made
into two loads.  A nomad tent in good condition is no cheap, make-shift
shelter but represents in value quite as much as the average house of the
sedentary peoples.  Year by year it is renewed; two strips of tent-cloth-
the cloth is about a foot wide- are sewn into the tent on either side of the
smoke vent (the smoke partially waterproofs the new addition), and the ropes are
rearranged to move the roof out to the sides.  Thus, the edge that drags on
the ground is always old and frayed, while the central part of the roof is
new.

The routine of tent life is quite different from that of the farm, but both
are alike in that the winter is a time of somewhat greater leisure, especially
for the nomads.  There is little milking to be done and less churning, fuel
is abundant and has only to be picked up from the cattle pens, and as the tribe
stays in the winter encampment the labor of moving camp does not break into the
leisure of the winter season.  Nor does early spring bring much change,
although lambing-time means some extra care of the sheep and the choosing and
preparing of the year's yield of lambskins.

The move to the first of the summer's campsites is made sometime about the
middle or latter part of Nay.  There is no particular reason to move any
earlier; the first grass appears in the latter part of April, but a little
grazing at that time will have no effect on the richness of the pasturage around
the winter campsite in the fall, and the new grass is as plentiful in the winter
pastures as anywhere else.  Also the heavy snows of the latter part of
April and early May are particularly to be dreaded.  May is the crucial
time for the nomad, and, except for the incidence of rinderpest or
hoof-and-mouth disease, a heavy fall of snow at that time is the greatest
danger, for it may mean the death of half the sheep and many of the cattle.

As has been intimated, during the winter some of the tribes live in rather
well made huts, made either of fencing plastered over with cow dung or of
sod.  Still others have sod walls over which tents are stretched for
roofs.  These winter structures are permanent, although those tribes which
are farthest from timbered country find it necessary to dismantle the roofs of
the sod huts and bury all the timbers to keep them from being stolen after the
tribe has moved away from the winter campsite.  Movement to pasture is
necessary for the Tibetans because the cattle cannot be grazed on a range but
must be collected in the encampment every night, and can therefore graze only
within the radius of a daily trip to pasture and back.  When the grass has
been eaten off- and in the beginning of the summer it takes only about ten days-
the tribe must move on.  Thus the tribe moves anywhere from six to nine
times before the last move back to the winter quarters, sometime in the
latter part of November.  In the latter part of September some of the
members of the tribe make a trip back to the winter encampment and cut hay from
certain selected hayfields for use throughout the winter.  It is
interesting to note that although the range and grazing-lands belong to the
tribe, and within the tribe the rights belong to the encampment, the right to
cut hay in certain hayfields belongs to individual tents.

With the return to the winter encampment and the release from the strain of
being on guard-for the winter encampment gives the greatest security of any
campsite- part of the men of the community go on the annual expeditions to the
sedentary districts or to the Chinese border to trade for the year's supply of
grain.  When that has been done the nomads have time not only to visit the
lamaseries for trade and religious purposes but also for raiding their enemies
and robbing travelers; the winter season is therefore somewhat dangerous until
early in the spring when the horses of the nomads are no longer insufficiently
good condition to permit hard riding.

A comparison of the nomadic routine with the agricultural routine shows that
the pastoral subsistence economy of the nomads has a definite advantage over the
agricultural economy of the sedentary Tibetans.  One of the direct products
of the pastoral economy provides the nomad with the basic materials-
sheepskins and hides- for his clothing and boots.  The pastoral products
furnish him with all the butter and proteins of his diet, and the surplus of the
yield from the flocks and herds in cattle, butter, wool, and hides is traded for
what grain he needs.  Trade must enter in, also, in supplying the farmer
with the meat portion of his diet.  And here we note that both sedentary
and nomadic Tibetans live on the same kind of food in different
proportions.  In each case parched barley flour, meat, butter, and cheese
form the staples, but the proportions are different; the diet of the nomad has a
higher protein content than that of the farmer.

The long silky hair pulled from the yak in the late spring, spun by hand, and
woven in the same primitive way supplies the nomad with the roof over his
head.  Thus the herds supply practically all his life-needs.  Even in
the matter of fuel cow chips and dried sheep manure are all that are used. The
nomad has to engage in little else than the basic livestock subsistence economy,
whereas the farmer must exploit the forests and rely on trade to house and
clothe himself.

The nomad has less in the way of comfort and security than the farmer.
The weather of the Tibetan plateau has driven travelers to the at most in
descriptive vilification, and the black tents are by no means minor storm
proof.  The nomads must sleep on the damp ground, live in a tent that is
often filled with flying spray and even swirling snow, and move in all kinds of
weather.  When he is on the move or in the summer encampments, he is much
more vulnerable to attack than the farmer in his protected, fortress like,
village home.

Such are the basic facts for a comparison of the lives of the two peoples,
and yet with this account we have hardly touched the real differences-
those of outlook, of ideals and practises in trade, war, and social
relationships.  That these differences must have some relation to the
difference of environment is fairly obvious, but just what that
relationship is, is difficult to determine.

We may start with the bald statement that the nomad is definitely superior,
not solely by his own account but by that also of all who have any dealings with
the two cultural groups.  The Moslem and Chinese traders so evaluate them;
the nomads naively classify themselves as superior and the farmers agree, for
the sedentary communities of northeastern Tibet are oddly apologetic of their
lot and status.  The farmers, in fact, have a definite inferiority complex;
they will say, "Oh, we are only farmers, not nomads." The farmer labors under a
definite sense of disability in spite of his more secure existence and the
greater degree of Comfort in his more sheltered life; though debarred from it,
he agrees that life in the saddle and in a tent would be ideal.  Certain
facts stand out to buttress this evaluation.  Given a higher rule by public
opinion, the nomad lives up to it by greater liberality in his social
relationships, by greater sportsmanship in the carrying on of feuds and
raids, and by being, in general, more trustworthy.

When guests and travelers stay with the sedentary people the treatment
accorded them is niggardly compared to the way the nomads treat their
guests.  The farmers will kill women, children, and even the animals of the
enemy in the course of an inter-village or inter-tribal war, but the nomads
disdain to injure women or children.  The lot of captives is much easier
among the nomads than among the sedentary people.  Stong-the life
money that is paid in atonement to the family of a man who has been killed-is
very much greater among the tent-dwellers than among the farmers.  Every
tribe has its own custom, but "life money" rates are uniformly higher among the
nomadic tribes and a comparison of the two extremes- the smallest life-money I
know of is about $35 and the greatest is about $800- indicates that among the
nomads a man is worth many times what he is among the sedentary people. The
life-money rates given are those for a man of ordinary standing, a chief or
any of his relatives has a much greater price.

Finally, if assigning a higher position to women is any criterion, the nomads
are notably above the farming Tibetans.  In both instances the women are
amazingly industrious, but among the nomads the women have much more to say
about the management of affairs and have a definite claim to a share of the
family wealth.  This may be because in making butter and cheese and in
milking the cattle and sheep (all such work is definitely women's work) the
women have such an important place in the nomad economy; they are so
indispensable in the management of the capital wealth of the tent that they have
gained greater power and voice in affairs.  The women of the farming
communities have a similarly important role in the agricultural routine, but
they do not have similar status.

One aspect of the difference between the rong-pa and the
drok-pa is the prevalence among the latter of a greater number of
prejudices and avoidances in the matter of eating.  None of these
avoidances has a universal religious basis, though all are variations or
distortions of the fundamental Buddhist prohibition against eating
meat.  None of the Tibetans of northeastern Tibet will eat fish, although
fish are eaten without prejudice in Lhasa, and few will eat eggs.  The
sedentary peoples will eat hares, marmots, and game birds of the pheasant
family, as well as pork, but some of the nomadic tribes farthest removed from
contact with the sedentary communities will not eat even pork, nor will they eat
green vegetables or mushrooms.  Thus step by step, from the sedentary
peoples on up to the nomads, what is decent and cleanly as food becomes
subject to closer discrimination.  The nomads take pride in their taboos as
showing what especially fine people they are and make frequent reference to the
disgusting eating habits of the rong-pa, who, though he dearly loves the
taste of a fat marmot, confesses it shamefacedly, for in his heart of hearts he
thinks that the drok-pa is right.

The superiority of the nomad in physique and health is also marked.
Such was the opinion of Dr. Rees, who traveled with us for about three months,
visiting both nomadic and sedentary communities.  We examined over three
thousand men and women and had ample opportunity to form an opinion. in spite of
the greater exposure and hardship incident to nomadic life, the nomads were far
healthier than the sedentary people.  There was a much higher incidence of
syphilis among the sedentary peoples than among the nomads, although there
seemed to be more gonorrhea among the latter.  There is no leprosy to be
found among the nomads although there is a very high incidence of that disease
among the farming peoples.

The Tibetans explanation of this shows something of the disability under
which the farmer pursues his farming activity.  The Tibetans as a whole are
morbidly afraid of arousing the wrath of the sa-ndre (earth
spirits) which can very easily be done by any activity involving digging. The
nomads who live in tents all the year around escape the necessity of offending
the earth spirits.  Those who dig sod for their winter huts admit that they
have trespassed but consider the trespass a minor one.  The poor farmers
must go on year after year antagonizing the earth spirits, and each year new
cases of leprosy appear among the dwellers of the earthen houses.

On first sight, the farmers with their well built homes and carefully kept,
personally owned, fields would seem to have a much larger economic capital than
the nomads, but the fact is that the Tibetan plutocrats of the land are to be
found among the nomads.  A careful comparison of the value of a good nomad
tent with that of a good house reveals that in spite of appearances the tent is
quite as valuable as the house; and when the value of the herds and flocks is
added the capital of the nomad tent is somewhat larger, on a similar scale of
wealth, than the capital of the farmer.  Proof is to be found in the
tendency of wealthy farmers to branch out toward a nomad way of life by setting
up cattle camps in the higher, uncultivated ranges of the farming regions.
Such a cattle camp is often a transition into nomadism, and wealthy farmers
often retire to a nomad existence.

The preference for the nomad way of life is clearly illustrated by the
position and habits of the Samtsa chief.  The Samtsa tribe is one of those
tribes which has two halves-a nomadic and a sedentary one.  The chief is
known as the Muk-ring chief, and his family probably originated in the village
of that name down in the valley.  The family homestead is located there,
and the priest-uncle lives in the big house.  The chief visits the village
occasionally, but he lives in the nomadic encampment, which is called
ngo-sker, and would be insulted if anyone called him a
rong-pa.

All these differences cut squarely across the social structure of
Tibetan life. There are tribes of which one half is nomadic and one half
sedentary, there are thsu-ba (clans), and even families, that
are divided in the same way.  The Tibetan family is a small unit and cannot
very well be actually divided, but there are cases in which the father and one
of the sons have joined the nomads, leaving the farm and the life of the farmer
to other sons.  During the old man's lifetime both the tent and the farm
are his, and during the winter he may actually visit and live in the village
home; with the growing-up of the second generation, however, the family becomes
two separate units, one nomadic, the other sedentary.  The differences
between the drok-pa and the rong-pa are expressed in every
aspect of living.  There is a drok-pa way to make boots and a
rong-pa way, a drok-pa way to wear one's clothes and a
rong-pa way, a drok-pa outlook and a rong-pa
outlook; and the difference expressed by such catchwords as steppe and valley,
farmer and shepherd, dweller of the black tents and dweller of the earthen
houses, divides the two people culturally even though there is no other ground
on which they are appreciably different.

The matter of priority is a question that arises in every aspect of our
comparison of the two peoples, but there seems to be no certain answer.
The linguistic conservatism of the nomads might indicate the greater
antiquity of their mode of life.  But their unquestioned superiority
and their higher standards might indicate that as their mode of life is higher
and better so it is a later development, away from the sedentary way of
life.  History, such as there is, gives no clue.  At the present time
certain population trends that we shall explain seem to indicate a movement
from the sedentary manner of life to the nomadic manner of life.  It may be
that there has been here, as Owen Lattimore suggests in the case of the Mongols,
a succession of changes presenting at this time the anomaly of two cultures
one sedentary and one nomadic- existing side by side with unmistakable
signs of a drift from the sedentary to the nomadic and with the latter by most
criteria definitely superior.

It remains to describe the nature and degree of contact between
drok-pa and rong-pa and to report the
interactive effect of such contact.  Foremost in creating the urge to meet
and the occasion of contact is trade. That trade seems one-sided, for it would
conceivably be possible for the farming communities to be self-contained,
whereas the nomads must trade somewhere for grain.  Yet it is not so
one-sided as would first appear.  There are Ngo-lok tribes which manage for
prolonged periods on what their herds and flock supply them- plus the bulbs of
edible potentella and some edible seeds- and get grain only at irregular
intervals. So, if necessary, the drog-pa could be self-sufficient
for a considerable period of time; although it is not certain whether their
numbers would remain the same because a diet of milk products and meat is
considerably more expensive than a mixed diet.  The exchange of foodstuffs
between the nomads and the sedentary peonies brings about the fact that both the
nomadic and the sedentary Tibetans eat the same- chiefly
tsam-ba (parched barley flour), butter, cheese and meat.  The
proportions, however, are different; the nomads eat more proteins and the
sedentary folk eat more starches, as we have pointed out earlier.

It is the nomads who take sheep, cattle, butter, and cheese to the lowlands
and brings back grain, for only the nomads possess enough cattle to carry the
grain; in other kinds of trade the sedentary people often take the initiative
and carry their wares to the nomad communities.  In either case, the
standing and security of the visitor is based on the functioning of the same
quest-host relationship which enables the Moslem traders to travel in Tibetan
country.  'n-e Tibetan may have certain advantages in dealing with a
fellow-Tibetan, but, on the other hand, he may also have a tribal or clan feud
to consider; so he must make arrangements to establish himself in relation to
the community he visits in the same way a Chinese trader or an American
missionary would.

The sedentary Tibetans go to the nomads to sell the special wares that are
created in wooded country.  The farmers exploit the forests to add to the
yield of their farms; in this way chums. buckets, rakes, tent-poles,
fence-palings, wooden bowls, saddles, and lance-shafts are taken into the nomad
country.  This inventory suggests the fact that there is more craftsmanship
among the farming people.  About the only distinctive article the nomads
create is the black tent-cloth woven out of the yak hair, and this is so highly
valued it can hardly be bought; hence the only trade in manufactured articles
comes from the sedentary regions.

In addition to the occasions for contact created by trade, there is a
one-sided movement of seasonal labor from the farming country to the grazing
country.  This is most pronounced at the time of the fall haying; long
before the farming people have finished their harvesting, the poorer farmers go
up to nomad areas to work in the hay fields.  For a few days their services
command fancy prices, and they get a chance to do what every Tibetan longs to
do- eat meat and butter.  Besides this strictly seasonal movement, there is
constant slow movement of unattached men and women to nomad regions, where they
try to attach themselves to some nomad family.  By helping first with rush
jobs, such as the shearing of the sheep in the summer and the de-hairing of the
yak in the spring, some manage to get a permanent place and eventually become
true nomads.

This brings us to the next, and probably most important, means of
contact between these two cultural groups; this is the population shift
from the sedentary to the nomadic groups.  In spite of the better physiques
and the better food of the nomads, their birth rate is extremely low- perhaps
because of certain physiological factors affecting both men and women and their
sexual relations as well, perhaps because of some other reason.  From
historical suggestions as to sexual impotency among the ancient Scythians and
other horseback peoples to more immediate considerations of the possibility
that a life in the saddle such as the Tibetans live creates temperatures
and conditions unfavorable for the proper development of sperm, there is a wide
range for hypothesis and investigation; but the fact remains that the nomads
have fewer children than the sedentary families. The sedentary communities under
consideration, as has been mentioned, are similar to, but not identical with,
those communities that appear to be dying out before the advance of the Chinese;
and these sedentary people have a fairly good birth rate, although it is not so
high as that of the Chinese. The movement of population among the Tibetans of
northeastern Tibet is plainly from the sedentary communities to the nomadic
communities.  I  have personally known scores of nomads who were first
or second generation arrivals from the farming country, but I have never known a
nomad to adapt himself to the conditions of life among the farmers.

The population shift is on two levels-the highest and the lowest.  How
wealthy farmers retire and become nomads has already been described; also how
the poorest members of the sedentary community can and do find their way into
the nomad manner of living.  Every rong-pa I ever talked with
seemed to think that the arduous but far more exciting and adventurous life of
the nomad was an alluring existence.

These contacts of varying kind and degree bring about certain
modifications in the distinguishing features of each culture.  The
nomad's high and lofty contempt for the farmer is kept in check by the fact that
at least once a year he will have to be beholden to the farmer for protection,
and patronage while he does his annual marketing for foodstuffs.  Also he
makes many friends and learns many things from them.  Thus it happens that
the nomadic tribes which are nearest the sedentary tribes acquire more sedentary
traits than do the more distant nomads; a corresponding statement can be
made with reference to the farming tribes and clans.  Thus whatever
differentiation has taken place is subject to a secondary modification through
the maintenance of a fairly continuous cycle of intermittent contact.

The most obvious result is a more balanced diet for each of the two
groups.  Another result is to be seen in the life of the sedentary
People.  As a link between the true nomadic existence and the sedentary
existence, the cattle camps of the farmers have a function over and above their
immediate one.  They follow nomadic patterns and are based on the
demonstrated profit of pastoral enterprise.  They give the farmers a taste
of nomad life and serve to introduce many an aspirant to life in the tent and
saddle.

In summarizing the cultural situation among the sedentary and nomadic peoples
of northeastern Tibet, we find an ethnic group that is homogenous in race,
language, and religion, but which is divided into two distinct cultural
groups.  This distinction is manifested in material culture, customs,
ideals, and general outlook, and is recognized by both groups in terms of higher
and lower, better and poorer, more desirable and less desirable. it can be
ascribed to a dissimilarity in subsistence economy, which, in turn, derives from
a difference in locale.  In each case, the particular subsistence economy
has fostered the distinctive cultural traits of the group.

V. SUMMARY

The nature and results of the culture contacts in each instance have been
summarized, and we can now correlate, or compare, the different varieties
of culture contact illustrated by the four instances cited.  We began with
four cultural groups: Chinese, Moslems, sedentary Tibetans, and nomadic
Tibetans.  Placing them at the comers of a quadrilateral, we, undertook to
describe the four aspects of culture contact represented by the sides of that
quadrilateral.  The salient features of these four instances of contact may
now be summarized in descriptive phrases, with which we will label the sides of
the original diagram.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andersson, Johann Gunnar.  Children of the Yellow
Earth.  New York: The MacMillan Co., 1934.

This book
gives the prehistoric background of the Chinese people as revealed in grave and
kitchen site findings in the loess.  It also incidentally gives brief
descriptions of present day conditions and manner of life in China.

Andersson, Johann Gunnar.  "Preliminary Report on Archaeological
Research in Kansu," Peking Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, The
Geological Survey of China, 1925.

This
Pamphlet gives a detailed account of findings in the Titao area where most of
the excavations were made together with a tentative reconstruction of life
in this area over four thousand years ago.

Andrew, G. Finlay.  The Crescent in North West China.
London, Philadelphia: The China Inland Mission, 1921.

This is a
fairly comprehensive account of the various Moslem peoples found in China'-,
Northwest with special reference to racial peculiarities, religious
organization, stirrings of Pan Islam, and the general problem of their
adjustment within the body politic of the Chinese.

Bell, Sir Charles Alfred - The Religion of Tibet. The Clarendon Press,
1931.

This book
tells much of the general religious beliefs and more especially of the
religious organization of the Tibetans discussed from the Lhasa view point and
thus more specifically informative about southern Tibet.

Bell, Sir Charles Alfred.  Tibet, Past and Present.  Oxford:
The Clarendon Press, 1924.

Deals
mostly with the present political organization of Tibet with reference to
treaties and contact with the powers.  Has one or two chapters giving a
general view of Tibetan history as drawn from Tibetan records.

Hedin, Sven Anders.  Through Asia. London: Methuen and Co.,
1898.

Volume two
tells something of travel in Tibet together with an account of some of the
people of the Tsaidam.  It also deals briefly with incidents connected with
the next but last rebellion of the Moslem in the nineties of the last
century.

Huc, Evariste R. and Gabet, Joseph.  Travels in Tartary, Thibet and
China.  New York and London: Harper and Bros., 1928.

A record
of the travels of Catholic missionaries in l835 through a part of Tibet.
The observations about Chinese, Moslems, and Tibetans furnishes a very
interesting basis of comparison wit present day conditions.  See in
particular the description of the Kolos (Goloks).

Futterer, Karl.  Geographische skizze Nordost-Ttbet.  Gotha:
J. Perthes, 1903.

The
account of the Futterer-Holder expedition forty years ago.  The expedition
traveled through the area of the Kansu-Tibetan Border and were robbed by some of
the very tribes we have traveled among.  Contains much data of truly
scientific interest.

Grenard, Fernand.  Tibet: The Country and its Inhabitants.
London: Hutchinson and Co., 1904.

An account
of the travels of Henry Dutreil de Rhins and party in Tibet.  Gives an
incidental but very accurate description of the surly sedentary Tibetans-
their villages and their character.

Laufer, Berthold.  Bird Divinations Among the Tibetans...
with a study of Tibetan Phonology of the Ninth Century.  T'oung Lao,
Vol. 15, 1914, pp. 1-110.

This
monograph discusses probable phonetics of Tibetan in the ninth century showing
changes that had already taken place in pronunciation in the two centuries since
it had been reduced to writing in the seventh.

Laufer, Berthold.  "Origin of Tibetan Writing," American
Oriental Society Journal, Vol. 38, 1918.  p.
34-46.

This is a
defense of the theory of the derivation from the Sanskrit of the Tibetan system
of writing as against the theory of a Central Asian origin from Ouigour or Turki
sources.

Laufer, Berthold.  Loan Words In Tibetan.  Leide: E. J.
Brill, 1918.

Principally demonstrates the preponderance of Chinese loan words in the total
number of loan words found in Tibetan.  Rather incomplete in instances
quoted.

Laufer, Berthold.  The Si-Hia Language.  Leide: Libraire
ci-devant, E. J. Brill, 1916.

A
description of a now dead language once spoken by peoples somewhere in the
Kansa-Tibetan area.  It may be that some of the aboriginal languages as yet
unrecorded may prove to be the lineal descendents of the Si-Hia language.

Przhevalskii, N. M. Mongolia, The Tangut Country and
Solitudes of Northern Tibet.  London: S. Low, Marston, Searle
and Rivington, 1876.

Although
much of his research and observations was concerned with geographic and biologic
matters this account of the travels of the great Russian explorer has much in it
about the life and manners of the Tanguts (Tibetans).

Rijnhart, Mrs. Susis (Carson).  With the Tibetans in Tent and
Temple.  New York, Chicago: P. H. Revell Co., (1911, 1901).

The
account of a trip toward Lhasa through north east Tibet giving much information
about the Tibetans and also interesting items about the next but last Moslem
rebellion, a part of which the writer was an eyewitness.

Rockhill, William Woodville.  Notes on the Ethnology of
Tibet.  Washington: Government Printing Office, 1895. (2) p. 665-747.
Smithsonian Institute.

A very
considerable though by no means exhaustive compilation of information about
Tibetan ethnology.  Mentions superiority of nomads and suggests reasons why
northeast Tibet may be cited as the center from which Tibetan people and culture
spread.  Contains much detailed information about Tibetan technicology.

Rockhill, William Woodville.  "Explorations in Mongolia and Tibet," (In
Smithsonian Institution Annual Report, 1892) Washington 1893, p.
659-679.

Along with
much incidental information about the Tibetans this report gives
considerable space to a discussion of the Salar Moslems.

Rockhill, William Woodville.  Diary of a Journey
Through Mongolia and Tibet in 1891 and 1892.  Washington:
Smithsonian Institution, 1894.

Considerable anthropological matter found in the detailed descriptions of
Salar Moslems, Dru-pa (Drok-pa) Tibetans, and the aborigines.
Mentions comparative purity of the Dra-pa type of Tibetans as well as
dialect.  Some discussion of skin coloring and anthropological
types.

Rockhill, William Woodville.  Land of the Lamas.  Kew
York: The Century Co., 1891.

This book
is rather a popularized presentation of the material found in other works.
There are some interesting descriptions of the Goloks and other Tibetans and
reference is made to the early Chinese classification of peoples as agricultural
and nomadic.

Stevenson, Paul Houston.  The Chinese-Tibetan Borderland
and its People.  Peking: The Peking Society of Natural
History, 1927.

Describes
with a distinctly anthropological flavor the border peoples on a section of the
border to the south of the Kansu-Tibetan border.  There are many striking
similarities between conditions in both places.  Contains some detailed
anthropologic description of some of the aborigines.

Tafel, Albert.  Meine Tibetreies.  Stuttgart: Union Deutsche
Verlagsgesellschaft, 1914.

A good
account of travel among the nomadic Tibetan with realistic data on topography,
travel techniques, and Tibetan life, all given from very much the outsider's
viewpoint.

Teichman, Eric. Travels of a Consular Officer in Eastern
Tibet.  Cambridge: The University Press, 1922.

A matter of fact record of travel stages, places, and people.  Some
incidental ethnological data.

Younghusband, Sir Francis Edward.  Peking to Lhasa.  London:
Constable and Co., Ldt., 1925.

The diary
of Brigadier-General George Pereira's trip.  Only as in a few pages he
gives some details about travel through the Chone district does it have any
direct bearing on the material presented in the monograph.