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pagoda, sixteen sided, with an inverted lotus of stone by way of a cap.  The whole thing stood about fifteen feet high, and seems to be called pagoda because there is nothing else to call it.  On each of the sixteen faces was one of the tablets of the lohans.  Many of the ancient paintings have been preserved in this way, and the most famous writings of the ages are all on stones.  The original pai^[[n]]ting or writing is pasted on the stone, and [[strikethrough]] throu [[/strikethrough]] and the design cut through it.  The cutting is usually quite shallow, but enough to show up well, and to make rubbings possible, by which means copies are available for scholars and connoisseurs.  At either side of the pagoda of the lohan were tablets, one with a picture of a saint on the front and a Kuan-yin on the back, the other with writing.  The room was full of tables, beds, cabinets, baskets of vegetables and old silk cocoons.  There was so much junk piled around in the back of the pagoda and the light was so poor that it was impossible to examine all of the tablets with care.  One would need much time for moving the residents' belongings, and a good flashlight to make a careful inspection.  The saint on the stone at the side was partially obscured by a cabinet and the Kuan-yin by a chair.  The dwellers who had followed us in were eager to sell us rubbings. I had long been wanting a lohan set, and as the rubbings were the best means for studying the carving too, we purchased a complete pack.  They seemed to be good, and to have been made from the stone.  That of course is not necessarily true as you will remember from my account of my visit to Ch'üfu last year.  The squalor of the court and the cluttered condition of the hall were most depressing.  What conclusion to draw we could not decide.  Were the lohan a greater treasure in hearsay than in fact?  Where they appreciated by scholars outside of Hangchou more than by the residents?  Did closeness to them, familiarity, breed contempt in the minds of those who profited from their guardianship and from the sale of rubbings?  Or, tragic thought, did this apparent mistreatment argue democratic ind[[strikethrough]]e[[/strikethrough]]ifference to old treasure and lack of interest on the part of those who should have cared?  Is this modern republican China?  The Chihese have a faculty for concentrating their interest on a thing irrespective of its surroundings, and perhaps the hall's condition did not jar them as it did us; and anyway there were rubbings.  It left me in ^[[such]] a mood that even the high