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62
As soon as my often postponed interview with the President in Peking had been accomplished, I set out for the town of Chinchow on the Manchurian railroad, to go thence to [[underline]] ICHOU [[/underline]] which I had finally identified with the "Wiju" reported by the Japanese surveyors.
[[underline]] WAN FO T'ANG [[/underline]] After tracing down some false scents and visiting several natural caves which showed no sign of ancient workmanship, I at last reached Wan Fo T'ang, the "cave of ten thousand Buddhas", high in the sand-stone cliffs on the north bank of the Ta Ling river about six miles from the town of Ichou.
There were a dozen chapels and grottoes and open galleries cut squarely out of the cliff side, and scars of others which had fallen in from the weight above or been scraped away in time of freshet.
The main grotto contained a square pillar (1) left in the solid rock in the middle of the cave from floor to ceiling, which was not of the specialized stupa ^[[underline "stupa"]]^[[-]] form in the grotto east of the temple of Yun Kang at Tat'ungfu. My disappointment was keen to find that the relief sculptures had been freshly repointed with plaster and that the wall spaces were coated with a full inch of plaster covering all evidence that may have existed of original frescoes. It did not ease my feelings to find ^[[an]] inscription recording that

(1) The presence of this central pillar indicates, in my opinion, an earlier style of North Wei cave chapel than those grottoes which do not contain it. Until M. Chavannes' text appears, we shall not be able to determine whether the plain pillar of Wan Fo T'ang or the stupa form of Yun Kang is the earlier.