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Updated: August 8, 2024
The baggage animals were led by my men and I rode behind. During the first two days we had a Mohammedan with us, Ördek, but he was to go back to headquarters, where all the rest of the caravan were ordered to await our return. We were to ride south-eastwards and endeavour to strike the great Mongolian pilgrim route to Lhasa.
Still another group might be compared to the begging friars when their brief, glorious day was past; they wander about the country, east, west, south, to Lhasa, to Omei Shan, to Peking, with little purpose or plan. As Huc says, "vagabondizing about like birds of passage," finding everywhere food and a tent corner, if not a welcome.
In the same year, China invaded and conquered Tibet. Tibet, under Manchu rule until 1911, had achieved a certain degree of independence thereafter: no republican Chinese regime ever ruled Lhasa.
We were now on the great highway to Lhasa. The next day we came to a flat open valley, where there were twelve tents. Three Tibetans came to our tent there at dusk, and had a long conversation with the Lama, who was the only one of us who understood Tibetan. When he came back to us he was quite overcome with fright.
I wrote to Valerian Harassan and was honored with a prompt reply his friend Mr. Henderson had returned to San Francisco and he had forwarded my letter there. "But you had as well try to correspond with the will-o'-the-wisp," he wrote. "When last I talked with him, he spoke rather vaguely of going to China and making a trip afoot to Lhasa."
I obtained my best conception of it on the evening I left Lhasa at the conclusion of my Mission to Tibet in 1904, when I had an experience of such value for determining Nature's ideal, and, for me at any rate, so convincingly corroborative of the conclusions which others who have had similar experiences have drawn from them as to Nature's ideal, that I hope I may be excused for relating in some detail the circumstances in which it came to me.
Sampo Singi blew his nose with his fingers, making a loud noise, and he did it so often that I began to think that it was some form of politeness. To make sure I followed his example. He showed not the slightest suspicion, only looked at our things and gave us the information we wanted. We had a journey of eight days more to Lhasa, he assured us.
But this was only a temporary reverse. A fresh Manchu army soon retrieved it, and Hami again became the bulwark of the Chinese frontier. At the same time Kanghi sent a garrison to Tibet, and appointed resident ambans at Lhasa, which officials China has retained there ever since.
There was a certain flower which I long had wished to study in its mutations from the singular forms appearing on the southern slopes of the Elburz Persia's mountainous chain that extends from Azerbaijan in the west to Khorasan in the east; from thence I would follow its modified types in the Hindu-Kush ranges and its migrations along the southern scarps of the Trans-Himalayas the unexplored upheaval, higher than the Himalayas themselves, more deeply cut with precipice and gorge, which Sven Hedin had touched and named on his journey to Lhasa.
Chinese soldiers were much in evidence, for this is naturally an important military post as well as the forwarding depot for the troops stationed along the great western trade route to Batang and Lhasa. The Chinese population under their protection, numbering some four hundred families, mostly traders, looked sleek and prosperous.
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