Across Yunnan. By Archibald Little. Edited by Mrs. Archi- bald
Little. (Sampson Low & Co., 3s. 6d. net.)—This volume con- tains a series of letters written to the North China Herald in the late spring and summer of 1906. It was the last of Mr. Little's valuable contributions to geographical knowledge. It did not receive the author's corrections; but we do not doubt that the editor's care has done all that could be required. Yunnan is in the south-west corner of China, a high plateau (five thousand feet), and about twenty thousand square miles larger than Great Britain. It underwent in the second half of the last century one of those excessive vicissitudes which cannot be paralleled in the Western world. Re population, estimated in 1850 at six millions, fell by 1871, under the pressure of civil war, to one million, and then rose again to twelve. Yunnan borders in one place on Tibet, in another on the British Shan States. The letters descriptive of the journey, of the country passed through, and of the inhabitants, with their manner of life, &u, are interesting throughout. Not the least so is the last (Part IV.), which contains the journey from Tonking, to Hong-kong, and has to do with part of French Indo-China. France is carrying out a rigidly exclusive policy, after the severest Tariff Reform pattern, in Tonking. Living there costs more than it does in neighbouring regions, while, on the other hand, France spends upon her Colony great sums of money from which she gets no return. That does not seem a profitable arrangement.
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