Word: bamboos
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...Peking, the working one at Chungking, the routine one at Shanghai. When the Embassy set up offices in Chungking last year, it was housed on the top floor of a U. S. Navy canteen, and the staff had to use packing cases for desks and sit on bamboo chairs...
...Chungking home, across the Yangtze from the city proper, Nelson Johnson rises at seven, eats a hearty breakfast (Sundays he has the staff in for waffles and chicken). He rides to the Embassy Office in a four-coolie sedan with specially strong bamboo lift-poles. There he reads and answers 40-odd telegrams from China sore-spots each day. If there is a big rush on, he helps decode messages. Some errand may take him to the Foreign Minister, less frequently to the Finance Minister, very seldom to Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. In the evening he occasionally gives a stag dinner...
Yellow-robed Je Chen, Tibet's regent until Tanchu reaches his majority at 18, greeted the reincarnated pontiff with due ceremony. From a golden bowl the regent drew one of numerous bamboo slips which, if a proper choice had been made, would bear the name of the new Dalai Lama. Sure enough, it bore Tanchu's. This ritual the visiting Chinese watched contentedly. By establishing a Chinese as Dalai Lama they had, for what it was worth, underscored the influence China has long claimed over chill, far, out-of-the-world Tibet...
...village. Author Egerton interviewed fortunetellers and sorcerers, attended dances, investigated charms, drank palm wine (it tasted like flat ginger ale), picked up stray bits of local lore. Sample: as fee, a Bangangté midwife is given the bananas on the tree where she has hung the sliver of bamboo used in cutting the navel cord...
Adventurer Miller tells how boys' noses are bored to take inch-wide bamboo plugs in each nostril, how a native village smells two days' travel away ("an acrid odor . . . like smoke from a bonfire of rubber boots"), how a trail-cutter can die from a cobra bite before hitting the ground. His accounts of jungle sex are more colorful if less accurate than an anthropologist's. For squeamish readers there is always the dedication: "To Mother...