国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

and the road-bed had been torn up. Three thousand people are said to have been drowned through this flood.

Our fellow-countryman ORVAR KARLBECK, who was staying in China this year, was one evening almost compelled to sleep over in our house on the occasion of a visit, for the rain poured down in such sheets that his rickshaw could scarcely get clear. Rickshaw coolies must on such days wade with rolled-up trousers through water above their knees, for the streets, and especially the narrow hutungs, run like rivers; and in all low-lying places lakes form in no time during these violent summer rains. On some days it came pouring down for as much as ten hours on end.

LETTER FROM BOHLIN

On September 2nd we had another batch of interesting letters from the field-workers in Kansu as well as from HvmEI, in Tebbu. BOHLIN, for example, related that he had found Carboniferous slate fish-fossils in which not a scale, not a fin-ray was out of place, and which looked like the finest drawings in Chinese ink on a sepia-brown stone plate. Further, he had collected fossil mosses and one hundred and fifty insects and larvae. On some of the insect-wings one saw the pattern in black spots. In one place there were innumerable day-fly larvae . »They are still crawling, » he wrote, »with all six legs outstretched. Dayflies, perfect even to the long caudal appendages as if waiting to continue their short Carboniferous day-fly lives. »

MANUFACTURING THE CHICAGO TEMPLE

Shortly after our arrival in Peking from Jehol we signed a contract with Mr LIANG for the completion of the copy of the Golden Pavilion. All the parts that were to be made in China were to be ready for shipment to America by the spring of 1931.

One day LIANG came and fetched LESSING and myself to his workshop in the west part of the city near the premises of the new National Library. We found seventy workmen hard at it at their benches, shaping the beams, brackets and lattice-work that were to be sent to Chicago. Piles of planks and posts and already shaped wooden pieces lay in the courtyard. When everything was ready they would set about carving the patterns.

On the wall in LIANG'S room there hung a painting, executed in colour, of the Golden Pavilion in Potala. It was really splendidly done. One of LIANG's painters had done it. We were so delighted with this picture that we asked what it would cost to have another copy. Twenty Mexican dollars! Incredibly cheap.

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