(See Baber, P. 191.) - H.C.] Taking Half This As Radius, The Compasses Swept From Yun-Nan-Fu As Centre,

Intersect near its most southerly elbow the great upper branch of the Kiang, the Kin-sha Kiang of the Chinese,

Or "River of the Golden Sands," the MURUS USSU and BRICHU of the Mongols and Tibetans, and manifestly the auriferous BRIUS of our traveller.[1] Hence also the country north of this elbow is CAINDU.

I leave the preceding paragraph as it stood in the first edition, because it shows how near the true position of Caindu these unaided deductions from our author's data had carried me. That paragraph was followed by an erroneous hypothesis as to the intermediate part of that journey, but, thanks to the new light shed by Baron Richthofen, we are enabled now to lay down the whole itinerary from Ch'eng-tu fu to Yun-nan fu with confidence in its accuracy.

The Kin-sha Kiang or Upper course of the Great Yang-tzu, descending from Tibet to Yun-nan, forms the great bight or elbow to which allusion has just been made, and which has been a feature known to geographers ever since the publication of D'Anville's atlas. The tract enclosed in this elbow is cut in two by another great Tibetan River, the Yarlung, or Yalung-Kiang, which joins the Kin-sha not far from the middle of the great bight; and this Yalung, just before the confluence, receives on the left a stream of inferior calibre, the Ngan-ning Ho, which also flows in a valley parallel to the meridian, like all that singular fascis of great rivers between Assam and Sze-ch'wan.

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