p. 12 | Missions in Tibet by Bishop B. La Trobe

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 20, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 16.

Missions in Tibet

By Bishop B. La Trobe

TIBETAN MISSIONS AND THE BRITISH ADVANCE TOWARD LHASA.

[By Bishop B. La Trobe, Missionary of the Moravian Church.]

THE eyes of many are now turned toward Tibet, for a British commission has entered the “Great Closed Land,” with a view of negotiating a treaty for an open door. If the hermit nation can be induced to open her gates to commerce, she may receive also the greater boon which the Christian Church has long been eager to give her. When the Gospel gains a foothold in this stronghold of Buddhism, it will be the greatest event thus far in the history of the land.

Sikkim is a little native state, three hundred and fifty miles north of Calcutta, which juts up into Tibet, between the two independent countries, Nepal and Bhutan. In 1887 trouble began by the Tibetans entering Sikkim. Remonstrances on the part of the Indian government, which has a protectorate over Sikkim, were unheeded. The Tibetans assumed a very threatening attitude, and caused much annoyance to the Sikkimese. At last active measures were taken, and a military expedition was sent which drove the Tibetans back into their own country.

The political negotiations which followed were extremely slow, but after much delay Chinese officers (Tibet is tributary to China) met the Indian commissioners, the boundary was settled, and pillars were erected to mark the border line. No sooner, however, did the Boundary Commission turn their backs than the Tibetans destroyed these pillars. The Chinese declared that they could not manage these wild Tibetans, and the Tibetan authorities said they also were powerless.

Meanwhile Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, has been watching the policy of Russia in central Asia. One feature of this has been the presence at Lhasa for a year or more of a Russian political agent, a Buddhist from the district of Lake Baikal.

With much patience the Indian officials have sought every means of coming to an understanding with the proper authorities. It is only after using every other method that at last Colonel Younghusband, a man of mature judgment and of wide experience in central Asian affairs, and Mr. Claude White, an officer with intimate local knowledge, were sent to parley with the Tibetans and Chinese. For their safety and the prestige of Great Britain it was necessary that a sufficient guard should accompany them. A force of three thousand men, under Colonel Macdonald, has joined the three hundred men with Colonel Younghusband in the advance to Gyangtse, ninety miles toward Lhasa. We hope that the Lamas will be wise enough to listen to counsels of reason and peace; for sooner or later the barriers, which the fears of the Tibetans have erected around their mysterious capital, must fall.

This expedition will probably have little effect on the Moravian mission in the western Himalayas. The missionaries have the confidence of the Tibetans on both sides of the border. Poo, the most westerly Moravian station, is only two days' march from the frontier village of Shipke. So far into Tibet the missionaries frequently have been, and the villagers know that they have no intention of forcing their way beyond. The penalty for this would be cruel punishments inflicted by the Tibetan authorities on the inhabitants of Shipke for allowing a European to penetrate into the country.

When I went up the Sutlej Valley in 1901, the Tibetans set a watch at the frontier; but that guard never saw the visitor from Europe, whose visitation of all our Himalayan stations involved mountain travel of nine hundred miles without an attempt to penetrate into Chinese Tibet.

Indirectly the political situation in the East has already had the effect of bringing up the chief engineer from Simla to inspect the Hindustan-Tibet Road. The nearer the frontier, the more difficult and dangerous is this narrow bridle-path, which winds along the face of the cliffs, often at tremendous heights above the great roaring river. A thorough repair would be an immense boon to the missionaries at Chini, and especially Poo.

Altho the stations are so near the frontier of Chinese Tibet, they are fully eight hundred miles from the scene of the present British advance toward Lhasa. Native traders and travelers go to Lhasa, both from Leh up the Indus, and past Poo up the Sutlej; but they have to pass over the lofty plateaus, whose population grows more and more scattered the higher they mount. Beyond Shipke there are not many villages permanently inhabited, and the traveler only finds groups of tents. Gartok ("the highest camp") is an important center in summer, but in winter no one is to be found there. The inhabitants go down to a village which lies one thousand feet lower.

Nevertheless, more than twenty thousand Tibetan Buddhists are settled around the mission stations in Lesser Tibet. The number to be reached from there would be greatly increased if the treaty should be made to permit missionaries to freely pass over the frontier. All along the natives have crossed that border, and many have come under the influence of the mission.

If an entrance into Tibet proper be gained for Christian workers who have been waiting for it at Darjeeling, we will rejoice. Whoever may be privileged to carry the Gospel into the heart of Tibet will use the grammar and dictionary prepared by the Moravian missionary Jaeschke. His Tibetan New Testament was translated, not into a local western dialect, but into the book language intelligible throughout Tibet. A revision of this New Testament by a committee at Darjeeling has recently been published by the Bible Society. Portions of the Old Testament, translated into Tibetan mainly by Redslob, have long been in use in a lithographed edition, and we hope that these will soon be printed by the British and Foreign Bible Society.—Moravian Missions.