Western Himalaya and Tibet / A Narrative of a Journey Through the Mountains of Northern India During the Years 1847-8

by Thomas Thomson

Le, the capital of the province of Ladak, and the most important place, and only town, of Western Tibet, is situated about three miles from the Indus, in the upper part of an open valley, which rises gradually as it recedes from the river, so that the town is rather more than 1200 feet above its level, or about 11,800 feet above the sea. The town occupies the slope, and surrounds the base of a low spur, on the left or east side of the valley, while the centre and right side are occupied by extensive tracts of cultivation, the fields rising in terraces one above another, and watered by little rills drawn from a stream which descends in the centre of the valley. The aspect of the town, which is very peculiar, is faithfully represented in the frontispiece to the second volume of Moorcroft's Travels, from a sketch by Mr. Trebeck.

In the neighbourhood of the town there are several small enclosures, planted with poplar and willow trees, in one of which we pitched our tents. These plantations were all young, a very fine garden of old trees having been, it was said, destroyed at the time of the Sikh invasion. The governor of Ladak, a deputy of Maharaja Gulab Singh, the ruler of Kashmir, to whom the rule of Ladak has devolved as a dependency of the latter country, resides in the town; but the detachment of troops, amounting to about 150 men, who form the military garrison of the place, occupy a small square fort on the west side of the valley, about a mile from the town of Le.

The peculiarities of the Buddhist religion, as practised in Tibet, which are everywhere conspicuous in all parts of Ladak, are especially remarkable in the capital. The principal monasteries in the neighbourhood of Le are at some distance from the town in the vicinity of villages both up and down the Indus; but religious edifices, of the many kinds which are everywhere so common in Tibet, are seen all round Le in great numbers. Along the road by which we approached the town, there is a very long building, of the kind called Mané, extending for more than half a mile. It consists of two parallel walls, twelve or fifteen feet apart, and nearly six feet high, the intervals between which are filled up with stones and rubbish, and the whole covered with a sloping roof, which rises at a gentle angle to the central ridge, midway between the two walls. On the roof are laid large slabs of slate, every one of which is covered with Tibetan letters, or more rarely with a rude drawing of a temple. The words on these stones are (I believe, invariably) a repetition of the mystical Buddhist prayer, from one of the words of which these curious, and apparently useless, erections take their name. The Mane seems one of the most indispensable accompaniments of a Tibetan village, and they may occasionally be seen even in desert tracts; so that the amount of labour which has been expended in their construction must have been very great, some of the largest containing many millions of repetitions of the words Om Mane Padme Hom. In the smaller villages they are often very inferior in size, sometimes not more than twenty or thirty feet in length, and three feet high. Every traveller has constant occasion to notice that in passing these walls the Tibetans always leave them on the right hand, considering it both wrong and unlucky to do otherwise; those proceeding in contrary directions therefore take opposite sides.

RELIGIOUS EDIFICES OF TIBET.
September, 1847.

Equally conspicuous in the environs of Le are the urn-like buildings, called Chokten or Chosten, which are, I believe, erected over the ashes of Lamas, or priests, and are, therefore, in a country where a third or fourth part of the male population adopt a monastic life, particularly abundant. Long rows of these, consisting of twenty or more urns of various sizes, may often be seen in conspicuous places above the villages, forming, from the brilliant whitewash with which they are covered when new, very prominent objects. Many of those near Le are of large size, and ornamented with rude paintings of dragons and other mythological animals of uncouth form.

The religion of Tibet, from the remarkable nature of its institutions and ceremonies, has of late years attracted much attention; but as, from the hurried nature of my journey, I had no opportunity of acquiring any information regarding it which has not already been made public, it is not necessary for me to dwell upon it at any length. Throughout the whole of Western Tibet, the monasteries are very poor, in comparison with those in the neighbourhood of Lassa, of which we read such gorgeous descriptions; all their wealth in silver and gold having been plundered by the Sikhs, during their short possession of the country as far east as Garu and Taklakhar. Still the number of Lamas does not seem to have much diminished, though they are more dependent upon the cultivation of the soil than in Eastern Tibet, where some of the monasteries are said to contain thousands of priests.

LE.
September, 1847.

The town of Le is said to contain about 3000 inhabitants. Many of the houses are very high, the former residence of the king containing seven stories. They are usually built of unburnt brick, formed from the fine lacustrine clay of the neighbourhood. The Sikh Thannadar has lately built for himself a house of stone, but he found it necessary to bring lime from Nubra, a distance of nearly forty miles, none being procurable so near in the valley of the Indus. The timber used in the construction of the houses is all poplar or willow, both of which are found to last a very long time in the arid climate of Tibet. The beams are laid perhaps two feet apart, and covered sometimes with small planking, but more generally with brushwood, over which is laid a thick coating of clay, so as to form a flat roof, to which there is usually access by a small stair or ladder.

The mountain ranges which bound the valley in which the town of Le is situated, though not lofty, are very generally rocky and inaccessible. They consist partly of distinctly stratified gneiss, but principally of a fine white granite, which decays with great rapidity, and contains many irregular nodules of an iron grey colour, much finer in the grain than the rest. The width of the fertile plain of Chashut, over which I made the last two marches down the Indus, had prevented me from ascertaining the nature of the rocks on the mountains to the left, so that I cannot fix the exact point where the granitic eruption comes in contact with the slates and conglomerates of the Giah ravine.

CHAPTER VII.