'I hope that the peace which has at this moment been established between us will last for ever, and that we may never again be forced to treat you as enemies.
'As the first token of peace I will ask General Macdonald to release all prisoners of war. I expect that you on your part will set at liberty all those who have been imprisoned on account of dealings with us.'
At the conclusion of the speech, which was interpreted to the Tibetans sentence by sentence, and again in Chinese, the Shapés expressed their intention to observe the treaty faithfully.[23]
The next day in durbar a scene was enacted which reminded one of a play before the curtain falls, when the characters are called on the stage and apprised of their changed fortunes, and everything ends happily. Among the mutual pledges and concessions and evidences of goodwill that followed we secured the release of the political captives who had been imprisoned on account of assistance rendered British subjects. An old man and his son were brought into the hall looking utterly bowed and broken. The old man's chains had been removed from his limbs that morning for the first time in twenty years, and he came in blinking at the unaccustomed light like a blind man miraculously restored to sight. He had been the steward of the Phalla estate near Dongste; his offence was hospitality shown to Sarat Chandra Das in 1884. An old monk of Sera was released next. He was so weak that he had to be supported into the room. His offence was that he had been the teacher of Kawa Guchi, the Japanese traveller who visited Lhasa in the disguise of a Chinese pilgrim. We who looked on these sad relics of humanity felt that their restitution to liberty was in itself sufficient to justify our advance to Lhasa.
On August 14 the Amban posted in the streets of Lhasa a proclamation that the Dalai Lama was deposed by the authority of the Chinese Emperor, owing to the desertion of his trust at a national crisis. Temporal power was vested in the hands of the National Assembly and the regent, while the spiritual power was transferred to Panchen Rinpoche, the Grand Lama of Tashilunpo, who is venerated by Buddhists as the incarnation of Amitabha, and held as sacred as the Dalai Lama himself. The Tashe Lama, as he is called in Europe, has always been more accessible than the Dalai Lama. It was to the Tashe Lama that Warren Hastings despatched the missions of Bogle and Turner, and the intimate friendship that grew up between George Bogle and the reigning incarnation is perhaps the only instance of such a tie existing between an Englishman and a Tibetan. The officials of the Tsang province, where the Tashe Lama resides, are not so bigoted as the Lhasa oligarchy. It was a minister of the Tashe Lama who invited Sarat Chandra Das to Shigatze, learnt the Roman characters from him, and sat for hours listening to his talk about languages and scientific developments. The exile of this man, and the execution of the Abbot of Dongste, who was drowned in the Tsangpo, for hospitality shown to the Bengali explorer, are the most recent marks of the difference in attitude between the Lhasans and the people of Tsang.
The present incarnation has not shown himself bitterly anti-foreign. During the operations in Tibet he remained as neutral and inactive as safety permitted, and it is not impossible that the hope of Mr. Ular may be realized, and an Anglophile Buddhist Pope established at Shigatze. Herein lies a possible simplification of the Tibetan problem, which has already lost some of its complexity by the flight of the Dalai Lama to Urga.
In estimating the practical results of the Tibet Expedition, we should not attach too much importance to the exact observance of the terms of the treaty. Trade marts and roads, and telegraph-wires, and open communications are important issues, but they were never our main objective. What was really necessary was to make the Tibetans understand that they could not afford to trifle with us. The existence of a truculent race on our borders who imagined that they were beyond the reach of our displeasure was a source of great political danger. We went to Tibet to revolutionize the whole policy of the Lhasa oligarchy towards the Indian Government.