The whole of this country, though so near the tropic, is the coldest and bleakest inhabited by a civilised people on the surface of the earth, if we except Siberia. Forests of cedar, holly, and other Himalayan trees, are met with in the valleys of the extreme east, bordering upon China. Lhassa is surrounded with trees of considerable size; and a few straggling willows or poplars, artfully pollarded for the multiplication of their staves, are found by the watercourses of Ladakh and Tibet Proper; but the vast extent of the table-land is bare and desolate, and as devoid of trees as Shetland. The ancient Hindoos are said to have esteemed it as a vault over hell. The only shrubs that dot the waste are the Tartaric furze, or the wizened wormwood, with its white parched stalks, or perchance, in more favoured spots, a few stunted rose-bushes. Though the winter is long and severe, snow is not frequent in the valleys. The air is of a purity and brilliance which dazzles and fatigues the eye, and its excessive dryness produces effects analogous to those of the scorching May winds in the torrid plains of Hindostan;—
"The parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs the effect
of fire;"
vegetation is dried to brittleness, and leaves may be rubbed between the fingers into dust. Mahogany chests, and furniture belonging to Turner's party, which had stood the climate of Bengal for years, warped and split under the cold dry winds of Tibet. Wood seems subject to no other cause of injury from time.
As might be expected, tillage is scanty, and the population depend much on imported food. Villages are small, seldom containing more than twenty houses. These, in the better parts of the country, have a cheerful appearance, the dwellings being all white-washed, with doors and windows picked out in red or yellow. Lhassa would seem to be the only city of Tibet worthy of that title: the Chinese geographers, indeed, and native itineraries, speak of one or two others, but nothing is known of them. Teshoo Loombo on the Sanpoo, ten days from Lhassa, though the residence of the second personage in Tibet, seems to be merely a monastic establishment. Indeed, the large convents are probably, after Lhassa, the most considerable nuclei of population in the country; and Lhassa itself has perhaps grown to importance as an appendage to the Potála, or residence of the Grand Lama.
No European traveller has described this celebrated city before M. Huc, and we cannot say that he succeeds in bringing its aspect before his readers very vividly. When within a day's journey of the city, one of the most rugged mountain passes of the many which the missionaries had met with, in their journey from the east of Tartary, still intervened. "The sun was about to set as we completed our descent of the innumerable zigzags of the mountain path. Issuing into a wide valley, we beheld on our right Lhassa, the famous metropolis of the Buddhistic world. The multitude of aged trees, which encircle the city as with a girdle of foliage—the lofty white houses, terminating in flat roofs surrounded by turrets—the numerous temples, with their gilded canopies—the Boodhala, crowned by the palace of the Dalai Lama—all unite to give Lhassa a majestic and imposing appearance." The city is stated to be nearly two leagues in circumference, and it is now without walls. Outside the suburbs are numerous gardens planted with the large trees mentioned above. The main streets are wide, well laid-out, and tolerably clean in dry weather; but the dirt of the suburbs is unspeakable. The houses, which are large, and several stories high, are whitewashed, according to universal Tibetan custom, the doors and windows being bordered in red or yellow. M. Huc does not enter into any detail of their architecture, but we may suppose that these houses are analogous in character to what is seen in other parts of Tibet. The lower part of a house presents lofty dead walls, pierced only by two or three air-holes; above these are from one to half-a-dozen tiers of windows with projecting balconies, and, over all, flat, broad-brimmed roofs, at a variety of levels; add to this, that the houses run into one another so strangely that it is difficult to determine the extent of each mansion, and that the groups of building generally contract in extent as they rise. On the whole, we may conceive a Tibetan city like a cluster of card-houses of various altitudes. In the suburbs of Lhassa there is one quarter entirely built of the horns of sheep and oxen set in mortar. The construction is solid, and the effect highly picturesque, the varied colour and texture of the two species facilitating the production of a great variety of patterns. Lhassa bustles with the continual traffic of crowds attracted by commerce or devotion from all parts of Asia, and presents an astonishing variety of physiognomy, costume, and language.
Less than a mile north of the town a conical craggy hill rises like an island from the middle of the wide valley. On this hill, Potala, (the name of which M. Huc writes Boodhala, and interprets, questionably,[12] to mean "Mount of Buddha,") is the residence of the Tibetan flesh-and-blood divinity. It is a great cluster of temples and other buildings, terminating in a lofty four-storied edifice towering over the others, crowned by a dome or canopy entirely covered with gold, and encircled by a range of gilded columns. From this lofty sanctuary the great Lama may contemplate on festival days the crowds of his adorers moving in the plain, and prostrating themselves at the foot of the holy hill. The subordinate buildings of this acropolis serve as residences to a crowd of Lamas of all ranks, who form the court and permanent attendants of the sacred sovereign. Two avenues lined with trees lead from the city to the Potala, generally thronged with mounted lamas of the court, and with pilgrims from a distance, who, as they move along, thread their long rosaries, and mutter the sacred symbol of their faith. The crowds around the Potala are in continual motion, but generally grave and silent, as if in religious abstraction. It is probably etiquette to be so.
Unfortunately our missionaries have ventured on no graphic illustrations; and the only attempt that we know of to delineate this interesting citadel of Buddhism, is a plate contained in the narrative of Grueber and Dorville's journey, given by Athanasius Kircher in his China Illustrata. It is meagre enough, but yet looks genuine, and not a mere Amsterdam concoction.
A singular legend is stated by Huc to exist, both at Lhassa and among the dwellers by the Koko-Noor, (the great salt lake on the north-east frontier of Tibet,) that the waters of that basin formerly occupied a subterraneous site beneath the capital city; but, on the breaking of a charm which detained them there, they passed off under ground, and flooded the valley where the lake now exists. It is curious that Turner met with a version of this same tradition on the southern frontier of Tibet; but there it was related that Buddha, in compassion to the few and wretched creatures who then inhabited the land, drew off the waters through Bengal. A similar tradition regarding the valley of Katmandoo exists in Nepaul.
The people of Tibet are of the great Mongolian family, and exhibit its characters in a very marked degree;—platter face, with prominent cheek-bones, button-hole eyes and upright eyelids, squashed nose, wide mouth, retiring chin, scant beard, coarse black hair, deeply-marked and weather-beaten countenances; naturally of a pale-brown colour, but tanned to any depth of copper, not without a ruddy tint at times; of a considerable variety of stature. The English traveller who, in traversing the steep valley-sides of the Himalaya, comes for the first time on a party of Tibetans driving southward their flock of sheep and goats—each little quadruped, like a camel from Lilliput, laden with some twenty pounds of salt or borax—is struck at once with the idea that he has stumbled on a group of Esquimaux out of Parry's voyages. These quaint, good-humoured people frequent the fairs of the British hill-territory, to exchange their salt for wheat and barley; and sometimes they get so far from home as to astonish, with unwonted apparition, the evening promenaders at Simla or Mussooree.
These uncouth peasants, though perhaps the best ethnographic studies, are not to be taken as samples of the culture and refinement of Tibet. The higher classes of the country have only been known to those few travellers who have penetrated to the capitals—Ladakh on the one side, Lhassa and Teshoo Loombo on the other. All these seem to have been most favourably impressed with the kindly and simple, but by no means unpolished manners of the educated class; the plain and unaffected language, the mild and unassuming demeanour, of the ruling prince at Teshoo Loombo—which Turner, at the same time, says was characteristic of all well-educated Tibetans—fully accords with the character of the regent-minister at Lhassa, as he appears in the later narrative of M. Huc.