Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
Tachienlu is surely sui generis; there can be no other town quite like it. Situated eight thousand four hundred feet above the sea, it seems to lie at the bottom of a well, the surrounding snow-capped mountains towering perhaps fifteen thousand feet in the air above the little town which, small as it is, has hardly room to stand, while outside the wall there is scarcely a foot of level ground.
Like and yet unlike the Tibetans I had seen in Tachienlu, they were slighter of build and gayer and more open of expression; they attracted me as the others had repelled me. Scrambling over the grassy slopes, I more than once lost my way, but some Mongol always turned up to put me straight.
Lamaism has Tachienlu in its grip, and I could have fancied myself back in Himis lamassery, thousands of miles away on the western frontier of Tibet. It was an extraordinarily picturesque scene, full of life and sound and colour.
But at Fulin on the Ta Tu I intended to make a détour to the west as far as Tachienlu, that I might see a little of the Tibetans even though I could not enter Tibet. I did not fear trouble of any sort in spite of a last letter of warning received at Hong Kong from our Peking Legation, but there was just enough of a touch of adventure to the trip to make the roughnesses of the way endurable.
Never have I seen men of more vicious expression than some I met in my strolls about Tachienlu, and I could well believe the stories told of the ferocity shown by the lamas along the frontier. Very likely the people are better than their priests, but if so, their looks belie them.
The country seemed barren and almost uninhabited, as though removed by hundreds of miles from the hard-won prosperity and swarming life of the line of Chinese advance to Tachienlu. Only occasionally did we meet any one, Chinese or Mantzu, and there was no stir about the few dwellings that we passed, all high, fortress-like buildings of stone.
When I went for my letters the morning after I arrived, I was shown a large heap of stuff on the floor of the little office, and the interpreter and I spent a good half-hour disentangling my things from the dusty pile, most of which was apparently for members of the large French mission in Tachienlu.
During the next day we were following the great tea-road, the road by which most of the twelve million pounds of brick tea consumed by the guzzling Tibetans is carried to the frontier market at Tachienlu. At all hours of the day straggling lines of men or ponies or mules were in sight, toiling along under their precious burdens.
Already Chao Erh Feng, the man who as Warden of the Marches had made Chinese rule more of a reality in Lhasa than ever before, has fallen a victim to Manchu weakness; hated by Chinese and Tibetan alike, he met his death at the hands of a rebellious soldiery in January, 1912. Between Tachienlu and Lhasa lie many hundred miles of barren, windswept plateaus and perilous mountain passes.
Some twelve monks took part; one, the abbot, was a large, fine-looking man, and all had rather agreeable faces, quite unlike the brutal, vicious look of the lamas of Tachienlu. There was much that recalled the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, processions, genuflexions, chanting, burning of incense, lighting of candles, tinkling of bells, all centring round a great figure of Sakyamuni.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking