At Gyantse the Chinese Mandarin and General, in whose train Manning had come, appointed him a little lodge in the courtyard of the principal house, and whatever he required was soon supplied by the Chinese soldiers and others who wished medical treatment from him. “One brought rice, one brought meat, another brought a table, another brought a little paste and paper and mended a hole in the window, another brought a present of a pen and candles.” Every Chinaman in the town came to see him. The General was “vastly civil and polite,” and invited him to dinner. But though he was “very much of a gentleman,” Manning concluded that he was “really no better than an old woman.” The dinner was tolerably good, and the wine excellent, but the cooking was indifferent.
On the other hand, the Mandarin was impressed by Manning’s beard. He had known men with better moustaches than Manning’s, for he had, “for convenience of eating, song, and drink,” cut his short in India, and it had not yet grown again. But the beard never failed to excite the General’s admiration, and he declared he had never seen one nearly so handsome. The General, likewise, approved of his “countenance and manner.” He pretended to skill in physiognomy and fortune-telling, and foretold very great things of Manning.
Manning also visited the Tibet Mandarin, who lived “in a sort of castle on the top of a hill,” the Jong, which General Macdonald attacked and captured in 1904, and they discussed Calcutta and Tibet together for half an hour, but what they said Manning does not record. The Tibetan intimated that he would return the visit the next day, and he sent “some rice and a useful piece of cloth, but did not come himself.”
With his medical practice Manning had a greater success. To one Chinaman and his wife, who were suffering from “an intermittent fever,” he gave “opium, Fowler’s solution of arsenic, and afterwards left them a few pages of bark. The mother-in-law, also, who had the complaint of old age, he cheered up with a little comforting physic.”
The General often came to see him, “for, like many other Generals, he had nothing to do, and was glad of a morning lounge.” He managed, however, to foist a Chinese servant on to Manning as cook. This man’s cooking was bad, but “in drying and folding up linen he saved him infinite trouble,” for, says Manning, “I never could to this day fold up a shirt or other vestment. A handkerchief or a sheet I can manage, but nothing further.”
Manning, hearing that the General was fond of music, and “no bad performer,” took the opportunity “one day, while he was smoking his pipe in my courtyard, of introducing the subject, and paying my court to him by requesting the favour of hearing music. This brought me an invitation to take an evening repast and wine with him, which was just what I liked. He gave us a very pretty concert.... The Chinese music, though rather meagre to a European, has its beauties.... The General insisted upon my giving him a specimen of European (Calcutta) music on the Chinese flute. I was not acquainted with the fingering of that instrument, but I managed to produce something, which he politely praised.”
The answer from the Lhasa magistrate to his request to be permitted to proceed to Lhasa arrived a few days after his arrival at Gyantse. A passport was given him, transport and supplies furnished, and as he neared Lhasa he was met by a “respectable person on horseback, who dismounted and saluted,” and who had been sent out by the Tibetan authorities to welcome him and conduct him to Lhasa.
The view of the Potala, “of the lofty, towering palace, which forms a majestic mountain of a building,” excited his admiration, but if the palace had exceeded his expectations, he says, the town as far fell short of them. There was “nothing striking, nothing pleasing, in its appearance. The habitations were begrimed with smut and dirt.... In short, everything seemed mean and gloomy, and excited the idea of something unreal.”
His first care was to provide himself with a proper hat, and, having found one, he proceeded to pay his respects to the Chinese Mandarin. Coming into his presence, he for the first time in his life performed the ceremony of ketese, or kneeling. The Mandarin received him politely, and said he had provided him with quarters. On the following day he visited two of the chief Tibetan officials.