ducal palace, blank and empty. This has been a very
serious trouble to the good people of Dongtse, and they
are apparently not without sympathisers at Lhasa. A
few years after the murder of their loved Lama a child
was admitted into the Ga-den monastery. He had been
born immediately after the crime, and to the awe-struck
amazement of the ruling lamas he exhibited the one
final proof of Sinchen Lamaship. His left kneecap
was absent. That child lives still, and in sullen determination
the people of Dongtse are but waiting till
their Lama shall be restored to them. Meanwhile
Dongtse is in a parlous state. Its religious life has
been broken into and a stranger imported from another
province to rule over them. Down in the town below
affairs are no better. The Pala family which reigned
in the great palace underneath the hill is exiled and
expropriated. A government chanzi, or bailiff, collects
the rents and pays them over to the man who by auction
obtained the beneficiary rights of the deposed family.
At Dongtse it is said that those rents are paid over to a
member of the family. Altogether the local bailiff seems
to be in a difficult position, for the offence for which
the Pala family was banished was merely that of having
abetted the late Regent in retaining temporal power in
his hands after the coming of age of the Dalai Lama. At
any moment, therefore, the Pala family may be reinstated
in their property with unpleasant powers of
retaliation.
Our small party—-one of us the only servant of
the Sinchen Lama who had escaped death— reached
Dongtse about noon, and immediately climbed the hill
on which the monastery stands; we were received
with the greatest friendliness by the abbot, and one or
two of the senior monks. The great temple was hardly
as richly endowed with silver and jewelled ornaments
as we had been told. It was curious to watch the
Shebdung Lama as he wandered round the old familiar
halls. For many years he had been an exile, and he
had never believed that he would see the home of his
loved master again, and as he put his forehead on the
lip of the lotus throne, upon which the great Buddha
of the place was seated, and so remained motionless for
ten seconds, there must have passed through his mind
something strangely like Nunc dimittis Domine. For
this man’s love for his murdered master after eighteen
years is still as fresh to-day as when they lived at peace
on this hillside of the Nyang chu Valley, and in all the
time since, the Shebdung Lama’s only happiness has been
bound up with the memories of his life here. He could
hardly speak as we entered the shrine, and was again
visibly affected when we ascended to the actual rooms
occupied by the Sinchen Lama.
These consist of a set of well-painted chambers,
opening out one from another. In the main room,
still empty and forlorn, save for a table containing
a hundred little brass bowls filled with water, there
is one of the strangest things in Tibet. The Sinchen
Lama, continuing the series of his ancestors painted
round the wall, had also a record of his own life and
ministry painted in a series of scenes by an artist.
His own portraiture is encircled by these little pictures;
the figure of the Lama is purely conventional, a mild-eyed,
celestial face with a pursed up rosebud mouth— the
picture which accompanies this chapter will sufficiently
indicate the style in which the work is done. Round him
there is a series of stiff little drawings not without some