in him ; for a lama, from the Sakya monastery, was invited to the Court of the great Khan, where Mongol religious indifference made a place and a ceremonial for every respectable creed. Phagspa Lodoi Gyaltshan, the favoured lama, would scarcely have gone to him who had just ravaged part of Tibet, had not the Eastern Tibetan king already bent to the majesty of the ruler, who in that part of the world seemed universal. That the temporal power was at ebb tide is evident from the fact that the mere fiat of the distant Khan seems to have been sufficient to place Phagspa as ruler over all the Eastern country.
This seems to have been the formal beginning (1270 A.D.) of the system of lama rule under Chinese suzerainty, which, with some interruption, has continued until the present day. Rivalries have existed between monasteries, as in other countries between contending royal families ; and when these rivalries became acute, and too much energy was expended in monkish intrigue, occasion offered for the uprising of some lay nobleman, or the special exertion of the recognised authority of the Son of heaven, or of some temporarily powerful chief of the Mongol peoples west of China proper and north of Tibet. Not until the eighteenth century was there disturbance from the south, nor from Turkestan on the north ; save that Ladak, so distant from the central provinces, was overrun in 1531 A.D. by a Mohammedan ruler coming up from Kashgar, and again, about 1610 A.D., by the Balti tribes to the west of Tibet, and who have continued their annoying raids against caravans up to our own day. A temporal
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