RECORDS OF THE JOURNEY
the Viceroy's son and the Fantai's nephew. In this boarding school every pupil has his own small room. Besides 2 or 3 class-rooms there is a good-sized reading room with a few hooks. Geerst has a large room here for his investigations. The curriculum includes Chinese, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, chemistry, French, English, Japanese. Tibetan and gymnastics. English, for instance, is taught by a Chinese who is not particularly strong in the language, but French is taught very thoroughly by van Dijk, Tibetan by a Tibetan lama with a Chinese interpreter, chemistry by Geerst. Gymnastics are practised both with and without apparatus, of which there is far less than in some of the other schools, and with rifles. The course is said to be three years, but there does not seem to be any definite syllabus. The pupils pay 3 taels a month. The school is situated in a fairly large part of the town enclosed by a separate wall.
The place was formerly used for the examinations, now abolished, that were formerly held in the capital of each province. The centre is occupied by a high and large pagoda, where the senior examiner used to live. A complete system of long, narrow buildings, separated by lanes of about a yard, runs at right-angles to the length of the courtyard. They contain innumerable small cabins, the doors of which open on to the lanes. A crowd of as many as 3,000 candidates of all ages had to sit here and perspire over the tasks that were set them. These buildings with their narrow lanes remind one most of a brickyard in Europe. Besides this central building there are many others in this large space, some of which are let to officials as living quarters. Splingerdt, for instance, whom I have mentioned, lives here, and some of the houses are occupied by small factories, in which for the present minor experiments are being carried out by hand and various trades are taught. The scale on which manufacture is carried on, and the high cost of raw materials make the undertaking unprofitable at the moment. Nor is professional skill yet on such a level as to make it possible to compete with other countries, but the efforts at training skilled artisans and at introducing branches of industry hitherto unknown to the population, deserve recognition. The idea was the Taotai's and he does not seem to be discouraged either by criticism from his colleagues, the absence of buyers or the high prices of goods that are often of poor quality. The anxiety for self-advertisement is shown by the fact that he despatched Japanese and East-Indian goods to Peiping as samples of the products manufactured.
At present there are the following departments:
A silk weaving mill, obtaining its raw materials from Shui-chuan. About 200 kilogrammes of silk and silk velvet are manufactured yearly. There are 4 looms at work, but another 40 have been ordered from Shui-chuan. There are between to and 20 pupils. Cotton weaving is done on a rather larger scale with 32 looms and 54 pupils. 30-40 feet are manufactured daily. A piece of 28 feet (Chinese) fetches 3,40o tchok, thin rough towelling of small size 1,600 tchok. About a dozen pupils are engaged in carpet weaving. The weft is stronger than in Eastern Turkestan, but the designs are uglier and the carpets cannot compete in quality with the famous Ning siafu carpets. There is a furnace for glass manufacture, but only two pupils. The glass (window glass) is greenish and of poor quality. Glass to the value of about 6o taels is manufactured in 3 days. A piece 1.5 X 1.2 feet
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