II.] THE PRESENT DALAI LAMA 37
chain of Chinese temples as far as Peking. His appear- ance in 1902 was thus described by the Japanese priest Kawaguchi, who in the guise of a Chinese physician had several interviews with His Holiness.
"He was a young man of about twenty-six years of age with a fine intelligent countenance. He was seated in a chair, wearing the yellow Tartar hood, or priest's cowl, and robes of yellow silk and red wool, with many under-robes of parti-coloured silks. He held his rosary of bodhi-tree beads in his left hand. Although the Dalai Lama possesses incredible stores of gold and jewels, and rosaries of every precious material, he carried only this simple rosary of the priests on each occasion of my seeing him. The attendants brought tea in handsomely carved silver teapots, and extending my wooden tea-cup, which everyone in Tibet carries with him, I drank in his presence. 'You must cure my priests,' was his frequent remark, but we discussed many other things."
Other hearsay reports from Lhasa merchants alleged that His Divinity is very proud and headstrong and subject to violent fits of temper, so it would seem that he is not entirely free from the failings of humanity. His court and counsellors consist of a number of Lamas from the chief yellow-cap monasteries around Lhasa, a sort of priestly aristocracy, with a very few laymen in addition; and all these are divided into factions quarrelling amongst themselves for chief power. The party in favour, for the time, influences the Dalai Lama.
He is, indeed, to be pitied on his uneasy throne, in this heated atmosphere of faction. Still young, barely thirty years of age, without any personal experience whatever of the outer world, he is surrounded by counsellors almost as ignorant as himself, who mislead him grossly, unwittingly or for their own ends, and present everything to him in a perspective so false that it becomes practically impossible for him to detect or to act
