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The Panchen Lama's Visit to China in 1780: An Episode in Anglo-Tibetan Relations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2011
Extract
In the autumn of 1773, the Panchen Lama of Tashilhunpo, Lobzang Paldan Yeshes, sent a letter to Warren Hastings in Calcutta. He was writing to ask for clemency on behalf of his vassal, the rajah of Bhutan, who had recently been defeated by the East India Company's soldiers in a border war. For some time, the officials of the company had been discussing how they might open relations with Tibet, and to Hastings this seemed the opportunity they had been waiting for.
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1 In this article we shall use phonetic simplifications of the Tibetan names. For example, this lama's name is spelled in Tibetan bLo-bzang dpal-ldan yeshes, while his capital, Tashilhunpo, is spelled bKra-shis-lhun-po. This Panchen (or “Tashi”) Lama was the sixth by Chinese and Tibetan reckoning but is usually called the third by Western writers; cf. Waddell, L. A., The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism (2nd ed., Cambridge, England, 1934), 236.Google Scholar An abridged version of his Tibetan biography, translated into English by Sarat Chandra Das, appears in his “Contributions on the religion, history &c. of Tibet” (Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 51, pt. 1 [1883], 29–43Google Scholar). This gives a conventionalized portrait of him (plate XHIa), but better ones may be found in JAOS, 52 (1932), plate II, facing p. 339Google Scholar, and in Asia, 29 (1929), 476. Another biography of him is given by Huth, G., Geschichte des Budd-hismus in der Mongolei (Strassburg, 1896), 299–324.Google Scholar This German translation of a Mongol history, written in Tibetan, is virtually unreadable because of the great number of Tibetan and Sanskrit terms and Mongolian and Chinese names in atrocious transcription. The dates for the years are miscalculated one year too early throughout.
2 Turner, Captain Samuel, An account of an embassy to the court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet (London, 1800Google Scholar), Introduction, vii-xii, gives a full translation of the Panchen Lama's letter. The Bhutanese, who were vassals of Tibet, had raided into Cooch Behar and carried off the rajah of that country, who had then appealed to the English for aid. See Sir Ashley Eden's report in Political missions to Bootan (Calcutta, 1865), 1–3.Google Scholar Earl H. Pritchard, discussing this episode, errs in saying that the Goorkhas invaded Behar (which is not the same as Cooch Behar) and that the Dalai Lama wrote a letter to Warren Hastings; see. Pritchard, E. H., The crucial years of early Anglo-Chinese relations 1750-1800 (Research studies of the State College of Washington, 4, nos. 3–4, Pullman, 1936), 231.Google Scholar
3 See Markham, C. R., Narratives of the mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa (London, 1879).Google Scholar The Introduction, pp. lxvii-lxx, gives the background of the mission so briefly outlined here. The lives of Hastings and Bogle can be found in the Dictionary of national biography.
4 n speaking of this second great dignitary of Tibet, Hastings and Bogle, and other Western writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, generally used the term “Teshu” or “Teshoo Lama,” instead of Panchen Lama, while later Occidental writers have used the variant “Tashi Lama.” Presumably these expressions were derived from the first part of the name of his capital, Tashilhunpo, but they are neither used nor known in Tibet and the other lama countries; see Sir Bell, Charles, The religion of Tibet (Oxford, 1931), 105Google Scholar, note 1. We shall, therefore, use the correct title of Panchen Lama, throughout, regardless of the term used in the sources quoted.
5 Markham, Narratives, Introduction, cli, lxx. The emperor in question was the Ch'ien-lung Emperor, who was born in 1711. Since, by Chinese reckoning, he was two years old on his first birthday, he was celebrating his seventieth birthday in 1780. For details of his life, see Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing period (ed. Hummel, A. W.) (Washington, 1943–1944), 1:369–73.Google Scholar
6 Markham, Narratives, 207-10. The date of this document given by Markham in parentheses on p. 207 is July 1778, but it was obviously written in the following year, for it was not until after April 1779 that Bogle heard of the lama's proposed trip to Peking.
7 Ibid., 208-09. In a conversation at Tashilhunpo on April 4, 1775, the Panchen Lama asked Bogle whether an Englishman had ever gone to Peking, and when Bogle told him that none ever had, except Dr. John Bell who had gone with a Russian mission many years before, he said that he would try to get permission for the English to visit the emperor (Markham, Narratives, 167-68).
8 Brief accounts of Purangir's extraordinary life are given by Bysack, Gaur Das, “Notes on a Buddhist monastery,” JASB, 59 (1890), 50–99Google Scholar, and Sarcar, S. C., “A note on Puran Gir Gosain,” Bengal past and present (The journal of the Calcutta Historical Society), 43 (1932), 83–87.Google Scholar Though he was one of the remarkable men of his time, he has been so completely forgotten that Graham Sandberg, in his Exploration of Tibet (Calcutta, 1904), 102, 105Google Scholar, was able to writxe that Purangir was the name of the Panchen Lamal
Gosain is an Indian vernacular modification of the Sanskrit word goswami and is applied to Hindu religious mendicants in general; see Wilson, H. H., A glossary of judicial and revenue terms of British India (ed. Ganguli, A. C. and Basu, N. D., Calcutta, 1940), 285.Google Scholar This book explains that Purangir is a fairly common name among these men. Bogle found a considerable number of gosains in Tibet. He speaks of them as “trading pilgrims” and remarks that though they were clad in the garb of poverty, many of them were very wealthy (Markham, Narratives, 124-25).
9 First published in Dalrymple's, AlexanderOriental repertory (London, in periodical form, April 1796, and as a book in 1808; pp 145–64 of the latter)Google Scholar and republished by Turner (457-73). In this report Purangir's name appears as “Pourungheer,” a phonetic transcription.
10 Our chief source is the Kao-tsung Shun-huang-ti shih-lu 
. the “Veritable record of (the reign of) the Emperor Kao-tsung.” The careful way in which the Veritable records were compiled ensured great accuracy and reliability (see Gardner, C. S., Chinese traditional historiography [Cambridge, 1938], 88–93Google Scholar). We have used the modern photo-lithograph edition (Mukden, 1937). Hereafter we shall abbreviate this title as KTSL. A second important source is the Gazetteer of Jehol (Jo-ho chih) 
. which has additional details of the events in the summer of 1780. In transforming the Chinese dates of these and other works to their Western equivalents, we have used Cheng Hao-sheng
, Chin-shih Chung-hsi shih-jih tui-chao piao 
(Shanghai, 1936).Google Scholar
11 Jo-ho chih, ch. 80:13-14. This temple was called in Chinese either Cha-shih-lun-pu Miao 
or Hsü-mi-fu-shou Miao 
, the former being a transliteration of “Tashilhunpo” and the latter the direct translation of this compound Tibetan word (ibid., 15).
12 Wei Yüan 
, Sheng wu chi 
(1842), ch. 5:15.
13 Erdeni, a Mongol word meaning “precious,” is the equivalent of the term rinpoche in the Panchen Lama's Tibetan title; see Waddell, Lamaism, 235, note 4.
14 
. When we visited Jehol in 1936, this palace hall was badly delapidated. For photographs of it in its present condition, see Nekka 
, by Tadashi, Sekino
and Takeshima Takuichi 
(Tokyo, 1932), 1:plate 7.Google Scholar
15 KTSL, ch. 1111:4, and Tung-hua chüan-lu 
, Ch'ien-lung, ch. 92:3. W. W. Rockhill made a number of errors in translating this passage from the latter source (The Dalai Lamas of Lhasa and their relations with the Manchu emperors of China 1644-1908 [Leyden, 1910]Google Scholar, 48, note 2). He gives the date as “45th year Ch'ien-lung, 4th moon, i.e. May 4-June 2, 1780.” It is true that the cyclical characters for the day are given incorrectly in this work (ting-ch'ou 
for ting-yu 
), but Rockhill still could have figured out the correct one by the order of this entry in the day-by-day chronicle of court events. The mistake of the month is less excusable. Presumably because of calculating the wrong date, he was misled into thinking that this item was recorded before the Panchen Lama's visit and must therefore have been a prescription for the court procedure when he came, and thus he gave all the verbs in future tense. Furthermore, it was not an imperial decree, as stated by Rockhill, but merely the standard recording of an actual event after it had taken place. Lastly, he left off the first syllable of the name of the palace hall and attempted to translate the extra character of the name as part of the first sentence.
16 Among the Mongol guests specifically mentioned (KTSL, ch. 1111:10) was Ubasi, Khan of the Torguts, whose tribe had recently (1770-71) returned to Chinese territory from Russia, in a dramatic retreat that inspired Thomas De Quincey's “Revolt of the Tartars” (first published in Blackwood's magazine, 42 [July, 1837]). De Quincey calls him “Prince Oubacha.”
17 KTSL, ch. 1111:10, 10b-ll; ch. 1112:17b, and Jo-ho chih, ch. 22:5b-8. Most of the events at Jehol were given by Sven Hedin in his rather popular Jehol, city of emperors (New York, 1933), 107–08Google Scholar, apparently translated from the latter source. However, his translator, T. K. Koo, was not particularly accurate and miscalculated a number of the dates. For example, he has the Panchen arrive at Jehol on August 10.
18 
. This is the third in the series of main halls in the Winter Palace. Foreign tribute missions were regularly received there. See Arlington, L. C. and Lewisohn, William, In search of old Peking (Peiping, 1935), 40.Google Scholar Note also the Japanese woodcut of a banquet there, reproduced on pp. 38-39, as this gives some impression of what the banquet for the Panchen Lama must have been like.
19 KTSL, ch. 1116:4.
20 KTSL, ch. 1118:7; also p. 10, for later entries on the same subject. The reliquary is here described as a “golden stupa,” chin t'a 
, but in another source it is called a “golden shrine for the relics,” she-li chin kang 
(Sheng wu chi, ch. 5:16b). This reliquary contained his body. The clothes he was wearing when he died were placed in a magnificent marble chorten (Tibetan-style stupa) erected by order of the Ch'ien-lung Emperor at the “Yellow Temple” (Hsi-huang-ssu 
), where he stayed on his visit to Peking. The emperor's inscription commemorating its erection, with the lama's epitaph, dated June 21, 1783, was published by Ernest Ludwig in The visit of the Teshoo Lama to Peking (Peking, 1904), 23–32.Google Scholar
21 KTSL, ch. 1122:9-10b.
22 Most of the accounts agree that the Panchen Lama left Tashilhunpo in July 1779: Purangir says, on July 15 (Turner, 548). Therefore he must have been more than a year on the way, but much of this time would have been spent at Kumbum, in Kokonor, where he spent the winter. For some reason, the dates of this trip have been greatly confused in Western writings. Imbault-Huart, C. twice says that the Panchen Lama came to Peking in 1781 (Histoire de la conquete du Népâl,“ Journal asiatique, 7th ser., 12 [Paris, 1878], 358;Google Scholar and ”Une épisode des relations diplomatiques de la Chine avec le Népâl,“ Revue de I'Extrime Orient, 3 [Paris, 1887], 5)Google Scholar. The inscription translated by Ludwig gave the exact dates for the lama's arrival and his death, but the translator was unable to figure them out; though he was obviously a learned philologist, his sense of history and chronology in this article is very weak. Lastly, Baron, A. von Stael-Holstein said that the Panchen Lama visited China in 1779 and died there in that year (”Notes on two lama paintings,” JAOS, 52 [1932], 345, 349, note 45)Google Scholar.
23 Rockhill (Dalai Lamas, 43) gives this date correctly as November 27, 1780, but practically all the other Western writers who refer to this event give the date as November 12 (see, for example, Markham, Narratives, lxx; Waddell, Lamaism, 239). The Ch'ing shih-kao 
(ch. 14:9) has December 1. An Indian writer discussing Bogle's career “corrects” the date to July 4, 1780, basing his contention on a letter from the regent at Tashilhunpo to Warren Hastings; see Diskalkar, D. B., “Bogle's embassy to Tibet,” Indian historical quarterly, 9 (Calcutta, 1933), 423Google Scholar. For comments on the complete unreliability of the dates in this letter see note 54, below. Incidentally, Diskalkar presents this letter as “unpublished,” though it appeared in the second most important source on his subject (Turner, 449-53). Of the four other “unpublished” documents in this article, one is found in Markham's Narratives, 124-29, one in Forrest's Selections from state papers, 1:75, and another in Turner, 454-56.
24 Actually not a coffin in our sense of the word (see note 20.)
25 Chung-pa 
with the addition of the Mongolian title for a “Living Buddha,” Hutukhtu, is the name by which this (later to be notorious) regent is generally referred to in the Chinese historical records; although an alternative name, Chung-k'o-pa 
,. is used for him in this letter. Rockhill, , Dalai Lamas, 47, note 2.Google Scholar, miswriting his name as Ch'ung-pa, said that it presumably stood for the Tibetan title Shakdzo (-pa), but this seems too farfetched. His alternative Chinese name, Chung-k'o-pa, might possibly confirm Markham's supposition that his original Tibetan name was Thango-pa (Narratives, 91, note 1.), but the single instance of its use seems too slight to serve as concrete evidence. Bogle speaks of this regent as “Chanzo Cusho” throughout: “Cusho” probably stands for the honorary title of kushog, as Markham has suggested (ibid.), but “Chanzo” has no obvious Tibetan equivalent. For a brief description of him as an individual, see Turner, , 241–42Google Scholar.
26 Nomin Khan (
, in Chinese) is the Mongol equivalent of the Sanskrit title Dharma raja, literally, “King of the Law.” The regents, or secular kings, of Tibet, like the co-ruler of Bhutan, always bore the official title of Dharma raja. Theoretically, only the regent of Lhasa should have borne this title, but as the Panchen Lama was, at that time at least, co-ruler of Tibet and sole ruler of the province of Tsang, the regent who ruled for him at Tashilhunpo also merited the title. In this connection, Turner's “Raja Nimoheim” was the Nomin Khan of Lhasa and was not the same as this regent of Tashilhunpo, in spite of Rock-hill's statement in Dalai Lamas, 49, n.l.
27 concernant, MémoiresI'histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages, des chinois par les missionaires de Pé-kin (Paris, 1873), 9:446, 454Google Scholar.
28 ibid., 447-53.
29 Oriental repertory, 273–82Google Scholar. This letter was again reproduced in Turner (443-48), since it was apparently considered one of the great curiosities of the period.
30 Mémoires cortçernant les chinois, 9:454Google Scholar.
31 These extra details sound quite circumstantial, but some of them at least, seem to have been fabricated. For example, Amiot speaks of the lama as staying at the Yiian-ming Yuan, the summer palace outside Peking, while visiting that city, when we know from the Chinese accounts that he actually stayed at the Yellow Temple (see Sheng wu chi, ch. 5:16).
32 Amiot has “the...of the second moon of the 46th year of Ch'ien Lung (1779 of our era),” although the 46th year of Ch'ien-lung was of course 1781. Dalrymple (Oriental repertory, 282) preserves the date in this form; but Turner, or his publisher, apparently felt that it would sound more effective to be specific and inserted the “16th” (of the second moon). The original letter is dated with cyclical characters corresponding to “10th day of the first month” (KTSL, ch. 1122:9).
33 See note 22.
34 Purangir's chronology in general seems rather doubtful, but that for the first part of the trip sounds very suspicious. It is difficult to see how he could have known how long the party took to reach Kumbuni, for example, when he was not with them.
35 For example, Jehol is written “Jeeawaukho.”
36 Turner, , 457Google Scholar.
37 ibid., 458.
38 ibid., 458-61.
39 Bogle said of the Hindu “fakirs” around the Panchen Lama, the group to which Purangir belonged, that as far as he could judge they were in general a very worthless set of people, devoid of principle and having no object but their own interest, combining the most fawning and flattering servility with the most clamorous insolence (Markham, Narratives, 88). But he quotes the Panchen Lama, who was apparently not deceived by his parasites, as saying that Purangir had served him very well, and he had not found him guilty of as many lies as most other fakirs (ibid., 165).
40 Turner, , 459–64Google Scholar.
41 ibid., 469-71.
42 ibid., 464-69.
43 ibid., 471-73.
44 As we shall see, this testimony regarding the conversations may possibly be entirely false; but whether it was authentic or not, it was considered so, then and later, and from this it derives its importance.
45 Turner, , 465–64Google Scholar.
46 This is a composite Tibetan-Mongolian title. The Chinese version of it is Chang-chia hu-t'u-k'o-t'u 
. This particular one was the second generation; he is commonly known as Lalitavajra, the Sanskrit equivalent of his Tibetan name, Rolpahi Dorje. See von, Baron A. Stael-Holstein, “Remarks on an eighteenth century Lamaist document,” Kuo-hsüeh chi-k'an 
, 1 (Peking, 1923), 401–02Google Scholar. Purangir's report calls him “Cheengeea Guru,” guru being the Sanskrit word for “teacher.”
47 Meaning Warren Hastings.
48 Purangir, or the translator, refers to himself as “the writer of this narrative” (Turner, 464), indicating that it was a written report; although the subtitle speaks of “the verbal report of Poorungheer Gosein,” suggesting that it might have been an oral one.
49 He uses the expression “three lacks,” one lakh, in Indian reckoning, being equal to a hundred thousand.
50 Turner, , 468–69Google Scholar.
51 Hedin, , Jehol, 111Google Scholar. In another place he says, “There is too great a discrepancy between Porungheer's (sic) account in Captain Turner's book and the Chinese records, and it cannot be denied that the latter are more credible” (ibid., 109).
52 The three communication from the Ch'ien-lung Emperor to George III are presented in translation in Backhouse and Bland, Annals and memoirs of the Court of Peking (London, 1914), 322–34Google Scholar. A few extracts from the first of these can illustrate the general tenor of them all.
You, O King, live beyond the confines of many seas, nevertheless, impelled by your humble desire to partake of the benefits of our civilization, you have dispatched a messenger respectfully bearing your memorial I have perused your memorial: the earnest terms in which it is couched reveal a respectful humility on your part, which is highly praiseworthy” (p. 322).
“As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures....It behooves you, O King, to respect my sentiments and to display ever greater devotion and loyalty in future, so that, by perpetual submission to our Throne, you may secure peace and prosperity for your country hereafter” (p. 325).
This Chinese attitude toward the “foreign barbarians” from the West persisted until well into the nineteenth century, as illustrated by their official documents. See for example Cammann, S., “New light on Hue and Gabet, their expulsion from Lhasa in 1846,” Far Eastern quarterly, 1 (August 1942), esp. 362CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 Turner, , 449–53, 454-56Google Scholar.
54 “We have investigated these with the aid of a Muhammedan date-table (Mahler, E., Vergleichungs-tabellen der mohammedanischen und christlichen zeitrechnung [Leipzig, 1926])Google Scholar, only to discover that the English equivalents given in Turner's footnotes do not correspond at all to the Persian dates in the text. Furthermore, the Persian dates do not correspond to the proper Tibetan ones for the events mentioned, even if we assume that the Persian names for the months might have been substituted for the Tibetan names. As the Tibetans in general tend to lack the well-developed historical and chronological sense of the educated Chinese, however, it seems quite possible that the lamas who wrote these letters just chose dates at random in order to give their statements an appearance of greater authenticity. For the Tibetan attitude toward dates see Hue, Abbé, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China (The Broadway Travellers ed., New York and London, 1928), 2:272Google Scholar.
55 Turner, , 449Google Scholar.
56 ibid., 451.
57 ibid., 451,454.
58 ibid.
59 Purangir first came to Calcutta to bring the letter from the Panchen Lama; and if he worked for Hastings later, there is reason to believe that he continued to serve other masters in Tashilhunpo. In 1778, not many months before he set out for China, a passport was issued to him at Tashilhunpo, describing him as “one of the servants of the (Government).” See Bysack, Gaur Das, “Notes on a Buddhist monastery,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 59 (1890), 99Google Scholar.
60 George Bogle wrote Hastings telling how the Panchen had written him, when he first tried to cross the Tibetan frontier, concerning the orders from the emperor of China that he should admit no foreigners from India into Tibet, (Markham, Narratives, 45, 48)Google Scholar.
61 Bogle, , in describing the Panchen Lama's fear of horses, gives the impression that he was by nature a very timid man (Markham, Narratives, 90)Google Scholar.
62 See, for example, Rev. Gleig, G. R., Memoirs of Warren Hastings (London, 1841), 1, 416–17Google Scholar. This writer has added a garbled and misleading interpolation to the effect that, before going to China, the “Tershoo Lama” wrote to Peking “in very high terms both of the English nation and of their representative.” His remarks on Bogle's mission are also somewhat confused; yet this is the basic biography of Hastings.
63 SirBart., George Staunton, An authentic account of an embassy from the king of Great Britain to the emperor of China (London, 1797), 2:52Google Scholar.
64 The suspicion of an unnatural death was not expressed in the English edition of Turner's book but was suggested in the French translation by Castlra, J. H. (Ambassade au Thibet et au Boutan [Paris, 1800], 1:528, note 2; 2:329, note)Google Scholar. It was expressed again as a possibility by Abel-Rémusat, J. P. (Nouveaux mélanges asiatiques [Paris, 1829], 2:54)Google Scholar, and more forcibly by Koeppen, C. F. (Die religion des Buddha [Berlin, 1859], 2:221)Google Scholar. It was still cited as a possibility by Diskalkar (“Bogle's embassy,” 423) and by Sven Hedin (Jehol, 117).
65 The Dalai Lama in Lhasa generally has the chief temporal power in Tibet, unless he is a minor. But while the current one was in his minority the Panchen had been ruling for him; and even after the Dalai had come of age (ca. 1780), the riper years and vaster prestige of the Panchen would have helped him to retain much of his power. It is not true, however, that the Ch'ien-lung Emperor gave the Panchen Lama on this visit “an Imperial diploma and seal appointing him the sovereign of the whole of Tibet,” as Sarat Chandra Das states (“Contributions,” JASB, 51:40), because what is apparently the said “diploma” is reproduced in KTSL (ch. 1113:17-17b) and turns out to be a formal document praising the Panchen Lama for his education and guidance of the young Dalai Lama and announcing the conferring of a golden seal of investiture on the latter.
66 Mémoires conçernant les chinois, 9:6–7Google Scholar.
67 ibid.; Sven Hedin also emphasizes the importance of the visit of the Panchen Lama in the Ch'ien-lung Emperor's plans to secure the loyalty and subservience of the Mongols for his dynasty.
68 “Contributions,” JASB, 51:29–43Google Scholar.
69 If the Tibetan calendar corresponded exactly with the Chinese in 1779 and 1780, as it seems to have, then all these dates appear to be a day off. There is a strong possibility, however, that the error is due to the translator's miscalculations, since Pelliot warns us that “all the chronological reductions affected by Sarat Chandra Das are suspect” (Pelliot, P., “Le cycle sexagenaire dans la chronologie TiWtaine,” Journal asiatique, 11th ser., 1 [Paris, 1913], 649)Google Scholar. Unfortunately, most of the studies in Tibetan chronology, like this of Pelliot's, discuss the system of recording years at great length, without mentioning the method for months and days.
70 Das, , “Contributions,” JASB, 51:39–41Google Scholar.
71 ibid., 42.
72 ibid.
73 ibid., 43. The translator calls the Chinese emperor “Emperor of the Celestials,” but the original expression undoubtedly must have been the Tibetan equivalent of the title T'ien huang 
. usually translated as “Celestial Emperor.”
74 The first strong denial was expressed by an anonymous but obviously learned writer in the Asiatic journal and monthly register for 1832 (new ser., 9, Sept.-Dec, 1832, 153), who said that all the accounts which he had been able to consult, respecting the death of the Tibetan patriarch, confirmed the fact of his dying of smallpox, and that the report spread in Europe that the Ch'ien-lung Emperor had poisoned him in order to dissolve the connection between him and Warren Hastings seemed altogether without foundation. More recently, the great Tibetan scholar, Baron von Stael-Holstein, in writing about the death of this lama, remarked, “A rumour current at the time, that he died of poisoning, and that Imperial displeasure, not smallpox, was the cause of his death, hardly deserves credence” (JAOS, 52, [1932], 349, note 4). Ludwig summed up the controversy neatly, concluding with the remark, “It is not at all likely that the Emperor...would have been driven to take refuge in the Borgian method of eliminating dangerous rivals” (Visit, 18). But the legend still lives on because of its dramatic implications.
75 Markham, Narratives, Introduction, cliv. Bogle was buried in Calcutta, where he died, and his tomb may still be seen there in the South Park-Street Cemetery. See Bengal: past and present, 26 [1923], 195.
76 Turner wrote a full report of this mission in his Account of an embassy to the Teshoo Lama (see note 2, above).
77 Hastings left Calcutta in February 1785 and was succeeded by John MacPherson, who acted as governor-general until the arrival of Lord Cornwallis (whom Washington had defeated at Yorktown), in the following year. MacPherson carried out Hastings’ idea of sending another mission to Tashilhunpo under Purangir, which was described by Turner (ibid., 419-23). Under Cornwallis, however, there was a distinct reversal of policy regarding the northern countries, and no attempt was made to continue Hastings’ efforts to maintain contact with Tibet. See Sarcar, S. C., “Some notes on the intercourse of Bengal with the northern countries in the second half of the eighteenth century,” Bengal: past and present, 41 (1931), 120Google Scholar.
78 See Hummel, , Eminent Chinese, 1:254Google Scholar, and Imbault-Huart, C., “Histoire de la conqufite du Népal.” The latter is translated from the Sheng wit chi (ch. 5)Google Scholar.
79 Turner, , 440, 442. For the effect of this suspicion on the Macartney mission to China, see Staunton, Embassy, 2:48 ff., and Pritchard, Early Anglo-Chinese relations, 332, 380Google Scholar.
80 When the British invaded Tibet in 1904, a Captain O'Connor visited Tashilhunpo and made the acquaintance of the current Panchen Lama, who was the nominal ruler of Tibet, since the Dalai Lama had fled when the British approached Lhasa. The following winter the Panchen came down to India and was received by the Prince of Wales, later George V; see SirBell, Charles, Tibet past and present (Oxford, 1924), 96–98Google Scholar, 123 ff. Accused of pro-British sympathies after these and other, rather casual, relations with the British, he met with such great opposition from the Lhasa government that he had to flee to China in 1924 and never came back to Tashilhunpo. He died on the northern border of Tibet in 1937, and his successor has not yet been formally “discovered,” although the Chinese have a claimant at Kumbum; see Life (Feb. 16, 1948), 78-79.