MANNING’S DIARY 21
afraid of jumping short, and having the laugh against
meB .y)
The manner in which he permitted his Chinese
servant to treat him is a revelation to those who know
the East. His only protest against the discourtesy,
insubordination, disobedience and, at last, openly-
expressed contempt of his Chinese servant, was to fill the
pages of his diary day after day, and week after week,
with whining complaints of the man’s “ unkindness.”
It will hardly be believed that, after he had achieved
the end which he had set before him, and at last actually
found himself inside the Sacred City, he still occupies
himself with petty personal grievances, with long notes
upon the treatment which he applied to his patients
there, with the effect of his medicines, and with lengthy
moral disquisitions upon the underlying influences which
affect all human nature alike. Until almost the end
of his visit, with the doors of the Jo-kang open to
him, he does not seem to have visited a single temple,
and when at last he did so he occupied a page of his
diary by a petty narration of his servant’s incivility and
his own silly conduct; of the temples visited he left no
description whatever, and the only clear thing is that the
Jo-kang was not one of them. Manning returned to
England after this great expedition and lived a life of
seclusion, and, it must be confessed, of eccentricity. Sir
Clements Markham has published the diary to which
reference has been made, and it certainly possesses a
very remarkable interest, if not as a record of observation,
at least as a psychological document which has
probably no jparallel in the world.
With one exception the record of Tibetan travel
from that day to the present year is, so far as Europeans