LHASA
gage in quasi-theological controversy with one who represents the Grand Lama. This ends in their throwing dice against each other (as it were for the weal or woe of Lhasa). If the demon were to win the omen would be appalling; so this is effectually barred by false dice. The victim is then marched outside the city, followed by the troops, and by the whole populace, hooting, shouting, and firing volleys after him. Once he is driven off, the people return, and he is carried off to the Samayé convent. Should he die shortly after, this is auspicious; if not, he is kept in ward at Samayé for a twelvemonth.
Nain Singh, whose habitual accuracy is attested by many facts, mentions a strange practice of comparatively recent origin, according to which the civil power in the city is put up to auction for the first twenty-three days of the new year. The purchaser, who must be a member of the Brebung monastery, and is termed the Jalno, is a kind of lord of misrule, who exercises arbitrary authority during that time for his own benefit, levying taxes and capricious fines upon the citizens.
Climate, &c. – Pundit Nain Singh, who lived at Lhasa continuously from 26th January to 21st April (1860), made indoor observations of the thermometer from 9th to 23d February hourly, with the exception of eight hours of sleep (11 P.M. to 7 A.M.); and the extreme variation in the record is from 26 (February 2d, 11 A.M.) to 45 75 (February 22d, 2 P.M.). He also mentions that the river (Kichu Tsangpo) which flows by Lhasa was frozen in December, – the great river (Brahmaputra) being open and passed by boats. Water kept in the warmest part of a house froze, and burst the vessels holding it. It is not easy to draw very precise conclusions from these facts, but they perhaps indicate a somewhat less severe winter than that of Ladak, where the true air temperature is reckoned by Captain H. Strachey to range between zero and 30° Fahr. In other respects the Pundit's account of the climate does not differ materially from those we possess of western Tibet. He says, besides, that strong and high winds are very prevalent, especially during March and April; but snow fell only twice in the three months of his stay, and not deeper than 3 inches. The fall on the surrounding hills was somewhat heavier, but apparently it did not lie, for in general hardly any snow was to be seen from the city. Should the snowfall in Lhasa ever exceed a foot, it is regarded as an evil omen. What little Desideri says is to like effect. The cold, he says, was never hurtful to health, and he had often spent the night (in winter apparently) under the open sky, without suffering. Lightning, which occurs only in connexion with the summer rains, is never known to strike houses or to kill.
It begins to be warm in May, and the sun's power rapidly grows most oppressive. There is a distinct rainy season at Shigatze (July to September), and this appears to extend to Lhasa, though the information is not very precise. Nain Singh was told that earthquakes are unknown in the Lhasa province. Cholera is said to be unknown; but dysentery is often violent, and rapidly fatal. Cough and chest diseases are not prevalent, nor are skin diseases common, in spite of the filthy habits of the people. The most dreaded of all diseases is smallpox. Inoculation is habitually used. Ophthalmia is very prevalent and severe.
History. – The seat of the princes whose family raised Tibet to a position among the powers of Asia was originally on the Yarlung river, in the extreme east of the region now occupied by Tibetan tribes. It was transplanted to Lhasa in the 7th century by the king Srong-dsan-gampo, conqueror, civilizer, and proselytizer, the founder of Buddhism in Tibet, the introducer of the Indian alphabet. On the three-peaked crag now occupied by the palace-monastery of the Great Lama this king is said to have established his fortress, whilst he founded in the plain below temples to receive the sacred images, brought respectively from Nepal and from China, by the brides to whom his own conversion is attributed.
Tibet endured as a conquering power some two centuries, and the more famous among the descendants of the founder added to the city. This-rong-de-tsan (who reigned 740-786) is said to have erected a great temple-palace of which the basement followed the Tibetan style, the middle story the Chinese, and the upper story the Indian – a combination which would aptly symbolize the elements that have moulded the culture of Lhasa, such as it is. His son, the last of the great orthodox kings, in the next century, is said to have summoned artists from Nepal and India, and among many splendid foundations to have erected a sanctuary (at Samayé) of vast height, which had nine stories, the three lower of stone, the three middle of brick, the three uppermost of timber. With this king the glory of Tibet and of ancient Lhasa reached its zenith, and in 822 an obelisk recording his treaty on equal terms with the Great T'ang emperor of China was erected in the city. There followed dark days for Lhasa and the Buddhist Church in the accession of this king's brother Langdharma, who has been called the Julian of the Lamas. This king rejected the doctrine, persecuted and scattered its ministers, and threw down its temples, convents, and images. It was more than a century before Buddhism recovered its hold, and its convents were rehabilitated over Tibet. The country was then split into an infinity of petty states, many of them ruled from the convents by warlike ecclesiastics; but, though the old monarchy never recovered, Lhasa seems to have maintained some supremacy, and probably never lost its claim to be the chief city of that congeries of principalities, with a common faith and a common language, which was called Tibet.
The Arab geographers of the 10th century speak of Tibet, but it is without real knowledge, and none speak of any city that we can identify with Lhasa. The first passage in any Western author in which such identification can be probably traced occurs in the narrative of Friar Odorico of Pordenone (c. 1330). This remarkable traveller's route from Europe to India, and thence by sea to China, can be traced satisfactorily, but of his journey homeward through Asia the indi cations are very fragmentary. He speaks, however, on this return journey of the realm of Tibet, which lay on the confines of India proper: – "The folk of that country dwell in tents made of black felt. But the chief and royal city is all built with walls of black and white, and all its streets are very well paved. In this city no one shall dare to shed the blood of any, whether man or beast, for the reverence they bear a certain idol that is there worshipped. In that city dwelleth the Abassi, i.e., in their tongue the pope, who is the head of all the idolaters, and who has the disposal of all their benefices such as they are after their manner."
We know that Kublai Khan had constituted a young prince of the Lama Church, Mati Dhwaja, as head of that body, and tributary ruler of Tibet, but besides this all is obscure for a century. This passage of Odoric shows that such authority continued under Kublai's descendants, and that some foreshadow of the position since occupied by the Dalai Lama already existed. But it was not till a century after Odoric that the strange heredity of the dynasty of the Dalai Lamas of Lhasa actually began. And in the first two centuries of its existence the residence of these pontiffs was rather at Brebung or Sera than at Lhasa itself, though the latter was the centre of devout resort. A great event for Lhasa was the conver sion, or reconversion, of the Mongols to Lamaism (c. 1577), which made the city the focus of sanctity and pilgrimage to so vast a tract of Asia. It was in the middle of the 17th century that Lhasa became the residence of the Dalai Lama. A native prince, known as the Tsanpo, with his seat at Shigatzé, had made himself master of southern Tibet, and threatened to absorb the whole. The fifth Dalai Lama, Navang Lobsang, called in the aid of a Calmuck prince, Gushi Khan, from the neighbourhood of the Koko-nur, who defeated and slew the Tsanpo and made over full dominion in Tibet to the Lama (1643). The latter now first established his court, and built his palace, on the rock-site of the fortress of the ancient monarchy, which apparently had fallen into ruin, and to this he gave the name of Potala.[1]
In the time of this Dalai Lama, Lhasa was visited for the first time by European travellers. In 1624 Antonio d'Andrada, a Portuguese Jesuit, had penetrated to Tibet through the Gangetic Himalaya, and returned the following year with a coadjutor. But the place which he reached was Caparangue in the kingdom of Cogue, as he calls it, i.e., Chaprangin the province of Gugé on the Tibetan Sutlej, and he never got nearer Lhasa. In June 1661 the Jesuit
- ↑ This name is absurdly explained by Abbé Huc as Buddha-la = "hill of Buddha." This is not even a possible etymology, for, whilst the actual term Buddha seems never to be used untranslated in Tibet, one may discern from Huc's own book that la means, not "a hill," but "a pass" over mountains. The name seems to be really taken from the classical traditions of the Buddhists. Potala, "the harbour" (the Pattala of the Greeks, the modern Hyderabad on the Indus), was in legend the royal seat, for more than a hundred generations, of the Sakya progenitors of Gautama Buddha (see Csoma de Körös in Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, ii. 390.
