National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

> > > >
Color New!IIIF Color HighRes Gray HighRes PDF   Japanese English
0348 Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1
Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1 / Page 348 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

New!Citation Information

doi: 10.20676/00000231
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR Text

CHAPTER XVIII

THE WOLF AND THE LAMB — COMMERCIAL
CONVENTIONS AND CHRIST'S CODE —
WHAT IS THE RIGHT ?

THE argument of the play is, then, something
like this: By a century of conquest stretching
gradually up to the high door-sills of Tibet, by a
century of aggression against the Tibetan suzerain,
the British have closed the once open door of
Lhasa, and have implanted a general fear of their
presence in every Tibetan mind which is capable of
understanding something of the outer world; then
comes a co-religionist who succeeds in having the
Tibetan religious chief send presents to the ruler
who is in temporal power over the visiting pilgrim.
They are sent, obviously, because asked for by an
interested intermediary. A similar mission might
easily have been arranged by British influence acting
upon some clever lamaist of Ladak, who could
have tested the Dalai Lama's attitude by request-
ing through the Chinese exchange of presents with
his distant liege, King Edward, even as had been
granted to the Buriat. But this was not done.
And if these were not thought dependable, there
are the Kashmiri merchants long established in
Lhasa, giving Great Britain a far more permanent
contact, through her intelligent subjects, than

228