TIBET TO-DAY.

Shannon News, 2 November 1928, Page 4

TIBET TO-DAY.

TELEGRAPHS AND OTHER , NOVELTIES AT

The present is a time when" closed lands" find it all but impossible to remain closed. Prospectors, missionaries and mere, adventurers blar-e paths anywhere and nearly everywhere." Traders follow closely. Then travellers conic. Airplanes abet advances. Electricity reports progress. Neighbour .states propose political ' agreements. Self-determination begins to be talked sabout and development of resources is urged. All along the Hue a general modernising attacks age-old conservatism. ,

• From all of which -it . follows that there are next to no V white ispots ' * on the cartographers charts. No longer is the Congo the inaccessible,'droamed-of object of a latter-day Joseph Conrad. Timbuktu is the terminus of a transSaharan auto trip and Tiflis a goal for trippers. Yucatan is as easy to traverse as is the Ukraine. Hvorca (rcchristened .Chosen)' is anything but " hermit'' whether in \repiite or fact. Samarkand is a household word, and Merv and Khiva way-stations on maintravelled roads."

So, too, Tibet. Though so long doggedly resisting all outside influences, the. Rome of Asiatic Buddhism has been drawn slowly but surely into this ,present-day current. Tucked away,: high up under the Himalayan eaves'.of the world—if not exactly on the very roof —yet it has notheen idble to insure longer the jealous seclusion with which it has itself through generations of topographical ungptatableness and the hostility shown strangers by its gay '■ and ignorant, dignified and dirty people.' Seven Visitors in 600 years. Lhasa, whose '' visitors' book " (had .there been one!) "could" have shown but .seven entries in the six centuries between Marco Polo's coming in 1278 and the adventures 'of Henry Savage. Landor in 1897, has been rather scribbled over of vJate/'Within as many years a quartet of well-known Europeans,.'have trod the all but endless corridors of the majestic Potala, towering :from its green slopes above the Plain of Milk, ringed about by mountains eternally snow-capped. Madame David-Neel and Sir * Charles Bell just the other day eaino out of tl;e country to write: about it, and Dr. MeGovern and- General Pereira were not long before them. :

If the passes now may be pierced without too much trouble, so, also, is theie something like ■ an -'up-to-date" movement behind the ranges. A tele l graph and some sample 'phones have been installed in Lhasa. The butter lamps which so dubiously have lit the Potala for centuries have given place to incandescent bulbs. The coinage system has been reformed. The beginnings of a domestic postal service have been initiated. ; -.:-'.-

However, the: curtain is being rung up on these .new scenes not without a few hitches. Yesterday does not yield ■to without protest arid, at times, more than just that, indeed. At the close of May—to give a instance, albeit of . noteworthy sort — word came out' of India' that an exploring expedition led by Prof. Nicholas Rocrich of New York, had only with greatest difficulty won its way south to Darjeeling after having been held for five months by the Tibetan authorities to the north of Nagchu—detained /through that time, that is, in a -wind-swept valley, .15,000 feet, above sea level, with the thermometer reading thirty to forty degrees below zero.

To which may, be added, in suggestion of a good part of the Tibetan' public thought, that the electrical ap-, paratus brought in for the lighting of Shigatse was pitched over a conveniont cliff," because obviously inhabited by devils, and. that the 400 fighting monks of Tashilumpo are refusing to pay taxes as a mark of their disapproval of the hew Tibetan army. This

last may well be professional jealousy. ••;' Progressive Dalai Lama.

Under the Dalai Lama of to-day the modernising process is apt to go through, albeit with such real jolts and. jars as now are rumoured. He is almost as progressive a monarch as his ".dear cousin," Amanullah. King ,of next-door Afghanistan. Sir Charles Bell, who spent two years with him, partly at Kalinipong and. some of the time in Lhasa, describes him as* &ank and sincere, not only . strict- in all duties of his religion but also a shrewd man of action. The mere detail that he is now living, in fact, is eloquent tribute to a capacity beyond the usual, for Dalai Lamas, "discovered'' when about five years old, have invariably, till now, disappeared a dozen or fifteen years later. . The relative longevity of the head of state and church to-day (he is in his early thirties) is due in large part to the chief of his four secretaries, Tsarong Shaped. One of ' the rare Tibetans to have travelled, he used a seeing eye and active thought as he : went/ and returned to. organise th<? new army and drive' the Chinese from the country. This was in 1912; two years later he put through the existing agreement «witlt Great Britain. Here might well come in a discus-. sion of Tibet's opportunities in international pontics save that that (as Mr. Kipling would phrase it) is anotn•cr story; also a long one. Suffice it to write that this land of Kim's Lama is, one more ofi the buffer states, which is to say, of course, that here is another retelling 'of rival bidders for various kinds and degrees of special favours.. England's Influence. '

Peiping so bungled things that she had all but faded from the picture when at last forcibly expelled. . It is not necessary to take Seriously Chinese influences. „ Russian intrigue, traditional and unvarying While the Tsars sat at St. Petersburg, has amounted to too little to regard since Moscow has taken command. That the Soviet power in near-by • Mongolia arid Turkestan is genuine, however,, is excuse enough for taking Russia into the count, although England is well in the lead ".to-day.; She must maintain that predominancy to protect India from -Bolshevist teaching 'I and preaching, if for no other.reason—and the frontiers of her mighty Protectorate run contiguous to those of Tibet for some 1800 miles. The current attention of the world is being attracted more and more to Asia, for it typifies spectacularly tho contest between modernism and conservatism, which is a very index of these times.Tibet is Asia epitomised.