IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| India and Tibet : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
322 IMPRESSIONS AT LHASA
of being too high-handed with Asiatics, but we are not so
high-handed with Asiatics as Asiatics are with one another.
In another respect the Chinese are very different from
us in their dealings with a feudatory State. Hardly one
of the Chinese officials we met in Tibet could speak a
word of Tibetan. Except that they married Tibetan
wives for the time that they were actually serving in Tibet,
they troubled themselves little about the people. They
remained quite aloof, took small interest in them, and
certainly never worried themselves, as a British Resident
would, to improve their lot in some way. The Chinese,
both here and in Chinese Turkestan, where I had also
observed them, preserved great dignity, were very
punctilious in ceremonial, were always, so to speak, in
full-dress uniform, and they were ever highly respectful to
one another. But the Tibetans were barbarians " in their
eyes, were treated with disdainful contempt, and the
Chinese officials thought of little else but how soon they
could get back to their own civilized country.
The Tibetans naturally resented this, and hated the
Chinese, but they were also greatly awed and brow-beaten
by them ; and I think, too, that the mere fact of seeing
more civilized men than themselves in their midst, and of
being attached to a great Empire, with an all-powerful
Court in the background, has in itself had much to do
with lifting the Tibetans out of barbarism. The aboriginal
Tibetans were a savage and warlike race, who constantly
invaded China. They have received both their civilization
and their religion from China, for Buddhism, as I have said,
reached them, not directly from India, but through a
Tibetan King's Chinese wife, the daughter of a Chinese
Emperor. Books and relics came from India, but it was
the personal influence of the Chinese wife which seems
to have had the greatest practical effect in establishing
Buddhism.
The Chinese have, too, on occasions done great service
to the Tibetans in repelling invaders , and the march of
the Chinese general, over many lofty passes, to expel the
Gurkha invasion in 1792 was a military feat of which
any nation in the world might be proud. Chinese
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