Mangshi

The name Luxi is derived from the meaning "West (xi) of the Nu(jiang)" — the "n" pronounced like "l" in the local dialect. The town itself is thoroughly modern. Hot and grey, the highway runs through as Tuan Jie Dajie, its eastern end marked by a large roundabout and its western end by a narrow, black canal. Just over this canal, Yueyi Lu points north into a jumble of quieter, older streets filled with markets. Luxi lies in one of the larges and most fertile plains of western Yunnan and before the communists Luxi was the seat of an indigenous Dai ruler: The plain is watered by the Nam Hkwan, a tributary of the Shweli, and is some 12 miles long by eight miles broad. It is full of villages and well cultivated, and is one of the largest, and quite the richest, of the plains inhabited by Chinese Shans. The town, like all the other villages of the plain, is so surrounded with bamboos and with banyan and other trees that it cannot be seen till one is close up to it. It contains 500 or 600 houses, well built of soft bricks in the Chinese style, and most of them have tiled roofs. The sawbwa's new palace is a very fine building, occupying a considerable part of the middle of the town. There is also a large monastery, and the whole place wears a greater air of prosperity than any Shan town I have ever seen. There has been a mud wall round it, but this is now all broken down. One of the sights of the place was a panther, which the sawbwa kept shut up in a cage just outside his palace. It was said to have been caught on the hills which overlook the plain. I have occasionally seen panther's tracks in Yun-nan, and no doubt they exist in many places in the province. [...] The height of Mong Hkwan is about 3,350 feet, and it is considered too unhealthy for Chinamen to live in except in the cold weather. A good many Chinese traders come here in the winter, but they all go away in March or April. The guide who brought us down from Hsiang-ta [Xiangda] went back home at once; nothing would induce him to sleep the night in the plain.