afterwards and the first rumblings of the Japanese war
cloud effectually held the hand of Russia. The Dalai
Lama therefore found himself in the position of having
paved the way for advances on Russia’s part from
which nothing was to be expected, while from our side
he could only await that demand for satisfaction and
a clearer understanding which he had himself deliberately
provoked.
By this time even the pious citizens of Lhasa were
g r um b l in g against their divine ruler. They whispered
that the Potala Lama, as he is not infrequently called
in Lhasa, after having murdered the regent of Tibet
and imprisoned the Shapes, was about to consummate
his folly by losing the country itself as well. The
wildest confusion prevailed in official circles; no man
trusted his nearest friend; the Amban, trying perhaps
to retrieve his credit at the last moment, appears
now and then in a whirl of fussy and impotent ill temper,
making demands that his master must be obeyed, that
transport must be provided for him, that the La-chung
men must be released at once.* No one paid him
the slightest attention, and at last he seems to have
subsided upon receipt of an unpleasant communication
from Peking, intimating that his punishment would
be decided upon after he had returned ; and this is the
end of Yu-kang.
Meanwhile the new Amban was slowly making his
progress towards Lhasa. He had started in November,
* Two men from Sikkim had been caught by the Tibetans and detained by them
during our stay at Kamba jong. It was almost universally reported that they had been
tortured and put to death in Shigatse, but on our arrival in Lhasa they were found to
be still in prison there, and on the 17th of August Colonel Younghusband had them
released. This incident at one time seemed likely to give rise to serious complications,
but thus it ended happily, and the men themselves made no charge of brutality against
their Tibetan gaolers.
1902, and fifteen months seems an inordinate time
for even a Chinese official to take in covering the distance
which separates Lhasa from Peking. He had
asked for an escort of 2,000 men to accompany him, but
as a matter of fact he found it difficult to provide for
the needs of the bare hundred whom he was allowed
to take. He had been selected for the post because
he was the brother of Sheng-tai who had concluded the
unfortunate treaty of 1890, and it was regarded as only
fitting and just by the Oriental mind that the harm
done by one member of a family should be rectified by
another. On his way he met Mr. E. Nicholls, an
American, at Ta-chien-lu, the frontier city, where
he seems to have spent some time in extracting money
from the Chinese prefect and the Tibetan “ gyalpo ”
alike. He seems to have asserted his intention of
restoring Chinese authority, and he admitted no
sympathy with the Tibetan desire for seclusion, arguing
that if Sze-chuan was open to foreigners there could
be no reason why the pretensions of the Tibetans
should be permitted for a moment. He moved on to
Batang for the same dubious purposes that had detained
him at Ta-chien-lu.*
On the 12th of February, the belated official
reached Lhasa and assumed the reins of government.
Later in the same month Dorjieff’s influence began
to wane. The intrigues with Russia had been overdone
and were the common talk of the town. It was
known and widely resented that the Dalai Lama
had sent back to St. Petersburg a Buriat who had come
Nicholls notes that at this place the hair and scraps of the finger nails of the
Dalai Lama were sold at enormous prices in the market, and Mr. Wilton tells me that
there is a constant demand in Pekin lor scraps, however dirty, of His Holiness’
clothing, and even more repulsive relics of the great Reincarnation.