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287.
[[underline]] CHAPTER XIV, THE FANG SHAN PLATEAU. [[/underline]]

[[underline]] Preparations for Digging. [[/underline]]
  We had thus at last received Gov. Yen's permission, delivered to us [[strikethrough]] verbally [[/strikethrough]] orally through Mr. Yü, the district magistrate, to proceed with our enterprise. Mr. Yü further assured us that confirmatory documents would follow in due course; but that these might require some time to draw up, and that meanwhile there was no reason why we need wait for the before beginning our excavations.
  After our return to our inn that evening, therefore, from the magistrate's dinner (see end of previous chapter), we sat up far into the night, making plans for starting work forthwith at the great Northern Wei grave-mound on the Fang Shan plateau.
  Among other things, we decided that Mr. Ch'iu could make himself most useful by remaining in Ta T'ung itself and looking after our interests there during our contemplated absence in the field; for we had learned that considerable opposition was manifesting itself to our doing any digging whatsoever in the district. This feeling seemed to be caused in part by a superstitious but nonetheless perfectly genuine fear that our excavations would injure the [[underline]] fêng-shui [[/underline]] or "luck" of the region (see page 166). We suspected however that it was more directly due to a spirit of petty intrigue and jealousy chronic in the old Chinese social organization---the same spirit that had nullified the effective functioning of the Archaeological Society that we had been at such pains to found more than two years before (see pp. 5, 6 [[underline]] sq.[[/underline]] and 72). For as a prominent Chinese once said to me, "You foreigners seem to coöperate to get something done; but we Chinese have a better way, for we coöperate to keep something from being done". This attitude---in Ta T'ung as elsewhere the greatest obstacle with which we had to content---now inspired certain