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15.
[[underline]]Chapter I.[[/underline]]

staff in the field about the first of August. Meanwhile our Minister, Dr. Schurman, who had displayed keen interest in what I had told him of the sculptured grottoes at Yün Kang, organized a party to visit them. Among his guests were Dr. Berthold Laufer, Dr. J. C. Ferguson, and myself. I spent two days in accompanying the Minister over the site, which as a result of his inspection he agreed would well repay excavation. Work there seemed the more feasible because the caves lay within the borders of Shansi, then called "the model province" on account of the excellent order maintained by its governor, General Yen Hsi-Shan [[Chinese symbols]] 阎锡山. Banditry and political disorder were unknown, and it seemed that we should be able to work there undisturbed. The difficulty would be, in view of the chaotic state of affairs in Peking, to procure a properly executed permit from the Central Government. This problem however we hoped that time and patience might solve.

[[underline]]Arrival of Mr. A. G. Wenley.[[/underline]]

Late in July, the railway having been blocked as a result of the disorders, Mr. Tung and I went by steamer to Shanghai. There, on August 1st, we met Mr. Wenley, our new colleague, just arrived from the United States. From Shanghai we proceeded in company to Hangchow [[Chinese symbols]] 杭州, once the capital of the Southern Sung Dynasty, to investigate the possibility of excavation there. I had learned that there were in the vicinity Buddhist sculptures of considerable antiquity, as well as ruins of certain temples founded during the Liang Dynasty (502-556 A.D.) and destroyed by the Taiping rebels about the middle of the [[strikethrough]] nineteenth [/strikethrough]] [[handwritten insertion]] 19th [[/handwritten insertion]] century. These sites, I hoped, might provide us with an alternative field of operations in case work anywhere in