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As my contract with the Yunnan hong was only to Ning-yüan-fu, it was necessary to make new arrangements here. My old men had expressed a wish to go on with me, but in the end only one did so, the others disliking the détour to Tachienlu which they knew I had in mind.
Under the double restraint of an unusually strong prince, backed by Chinese officials, the priests of Tachienlu are less truculent than farther west, but at best Lamaism rests with a heavy hand upon the Tibetans; it is greedy and repulsive in aspect and brutalizing in its effects; wholly unlike the gentle, even though ignorant and superstitious, Buddhism of China.
From Tibet are brought skins and wool and gold and musk, to be exchanged here for tobacco and cloth and miscellaneous articles, but tea, of course, forms the great article of trade, the quantity sent from Tachienlu annually amounting to more than twelve million pounds.
It had been a long, hard pull from Ning-yüan-fu; two weeks' continuous travelling is a tax upon every one, but at no place had we found comfortable quarters for the whole of the party, and as the men preferred to push on, I was not inclined to object. But usually a seventh-day rest is very acceptable to them; so we were all glad for a little breathing-space in Tachienlu.
We found room in Wa Ssu Kou in the same "comfy" inn as before, and the welcome we received gave me a truly homelike feeling. Soon after starting the next morning we passed the funeral cortège of a Chinese official of Tachienlu, making his last long journey to his distant home two hundred li beyond Chengtu.
The first fine morning after my arrival I made an early start for the summer palace of the King of Chala, situated about eight miles from Tachienlu in a beautiful, lonely valley among the mountains.
The boundary of Tibet in regard to China includes that portion of Sinkiang south of Kuenlun Range and Altyn Tagh, the whole territory of Chinghai, the western portion of Kansuh and Szechuan, including Tachienlu, and the northwestern portion of Yunnan, including Atuntzu. Great Britain and Tibet to negotiate, independent of China, new trade regulations.
Other indications of the Buddhist's comfortable way of getting his prayers said for him are found all about Tachienlu. From temple roof and wayside rock flags bearing the same legend wave in the breeze, each flutter a prayer, and just outside the city we rode by a long stone wall, much like those of New England, only its top was covered over with inscribed stones.
And in this appropriate way does the monster-play end. To the Military and Civil Governors of the Provinces, the Military Commissioners at Foochow and Kweiyang; the Military Commandants at Changteh, Kweihuating, and Kalgan; and the Commissioner of Defence at Tachienlu: The change in the form of the state is now happily accomplished.
To be sure, the arrangements at Tachienlu were rather primitive, but the surprising thing was that there should be any post-office at all.
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