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Rh away. On other days horse-races take place from Sera to Potala, and foot-races from Potala to the city. On the 27th of the month the holy Dorjē is carried in solemn procession from Sera to the Jokhang, and to the presence of the lama at Potala.

Of other great annual feasts, one, in the fourth month, is assigned to the conception of Sakya, but appears to connect itself with the old nature-feast of the entering of spring, and to be more or less identical with the Hūlī of India. A second, the consecration of the waters, in September-October, appears, on the confines of India, to be associated with the Dasehra.

On the 30th day of the second month there takes place a strange ceremony, akin to that of the scapegoat (which is not unknown in India). It is called the driving out of the demon. A man is hired to perform the part of demon (or victim rather), a part which sometimes ends fatally. He is fantastically dressed, his face mottled with white and black, and is then brought forth from the Jokhang to engage in quasi-theological controversy with one who represents the Grand Lama. This ends in their throwing dice against each other (as it were for the weal or woe of Lhasa). If the demon were to win the omen would be appalling; so this is effectually barred by false dice. The victim is then marched outside the city, followed by the troops and by the whole populace, hooting, shouting and firing volleys after him. Once he is driven off, the people return, and he is carried off to the Samyé convent. Should he die shortly after, this is auspicious; if not, he is kept in ward at Samyé for a twelvemonth.

Nain Singh, whose habitual accuracy is attested by many facts, mentions a strange practice of comparatively recent origin, according to which the civil power in the city is put up to auction for the first twenty-three days of the new year. The purchaser, who must be a member of the Debung monastery, and is termed the Jalno, is a kind of lord of misrule, who exercises arbitrary authority during that time for his own benefit, levying taxes and capricious fines upon the citizens.

History.—The seat of the princes whose family raised Tibet to a position among the powers of Asia was originally on the Yarlung river, in the extreme east of the region now occupied by Tibetan tribes. It was transplanted to Lhasa in the 7th century by the king Srong-tsan-gampo, conqueror, civilizer and proselytizer, the founder of Buddhism in Tibet, the introducer of the Indian alphabet. On the three-peaked crag now occupied by the palace-monastery of the Grand Lama this king is said to have established his fortress, while he founded in the plain below temples to receive the sacred images, brought respectively from Nepal and from China by the brides to whom his own conversion is attributed.

Tibet endured as a conquering power some two centuries, and the more famous among the descendants of the founder added to the city. This-rong-de-tsan (who reigned 740–786) is said to have erected a great temple-palace of which the basement followed the Tibetan style, the middle storey the Chinese, and the upper storey the Indian—a combination which would aptly symbolize the elements that have moulded the culture of Lhasa. His son, the last of the great orthodox kings, in the next century, is said to have summoned artists from Nepal and India, and among many splendid foundations to have erected a sanctuary (at Samyé) of vast height, which had nine storeys, the three lower of stone, the three middle of brick, the three uppermost of timber. With this king the glory of Tibet and of ancient Lhasa reached its zenith, and in 822, a monument recording his treaty on equal terms with the Great T’ang emperor of China was erected in the city. There followed dark days for Lhasa and the Buddhist church in the accession of this king’s brother Langdharma, who has been called the Julian of the lamas. This king rejected the doctrine, persecuted and scattered its ministers, and threw down its temples, convents and images. It was more than a century before Buddhism recovered its hold and its convents were rehabilitated over Tibet. The country was then split into an infinity of petty states, many of them ruled from the convents by warlike ecclesiastics; but, though the old monarchy never recovered, Lhasa seems to have maintained some supremacy, and probably never lost its claim to be the chief city of that congeries of principalities, with a common faith and a common language, which was called Tibet.

The Arab geographers of the 10th century speak of Tibet, but without real knowledge, and none speaks of any city that we can identify with Lhasa. The first passage in any Western author in which such identification can be probably traced occurs in the narrative of Friar Odoric of Pordenone (c. 1330). This remarkable traveller’s route from Europe to India, and thence by sea to China, can be traced satisfactorily, but of his journey homeward through Asia the indications are very fragmentary. He speaks, however, on this return journey of the realm of Tibet, which lay on the confines of India proper: “The folk of that country dwell in tents made of black felt. But the chief and royal city is all built with walls of black and white, and all its streets are very well paved. In this city no one shall dare to shed the blood of any, whether man or beast, for the reverence they bear a certain idol that is there worshipped. In that city dwelleth the Abassi, i.e. in their tongue the pope, who is the head of all the idolaters, and has the disposal of all their benefices such as they are after their manner.”

We know that Kublai Khan had constituted a young prince of the Lama Church, Mati Dhwaja, as head of that body, and tributary ruler of Tibet, but besides this all is obscure for a century. This passage of Odoric shows that such authority continued under Kublai’s descendants, and that some foreshadow of the position since occupied by the Dalai Lama already existed. But it was not till a century after Odoric that the strange heredity of the dynasty of the Dalai Lamas of Lhasa actually began. In the first two centuries of its existence the residence of these pontiffs was rather at Debung or Sera than at Lhasa itself, though the latter was the centre of devout resort. A great event for Lhasa was the conversion, or reconversion, of the Mongols to Lamaism (c. 1577), which made the city the focus of sanctity and pilgrimage to so vast a tract of Asia. It was in the middle of the 17th century that Lhasa became the residence of the Dalai Lama. A native prince, known as the Tsangpo, with his seat at Shigatse, had made himself master of southern Tibet, and threatened to absorb the whole. The fifth Dalai Lama, Nagwang Lobzang, called in the aid of a Kalmuck prince, Gushi Khan, from the neighbourhood of the Koko-nor, who defeated and slew the Tsangpo and made over full dominion in Tibet to the lama (1641). The latter now first established his court and built his palace on the rock-site of the fortress of the ancient monarchy, which apparently had fallen into ruin, and to this he gave the name of Potala.

The founder of Potala died in 1681. He had appointed as “regent” or civil administrator (Deisri, or Deba) one supposed to be his own natural son. This remarkable personage, Sangye Gyamtso, of great ambition and accomplishment, still renowned in Tibet as the author of some of the most valued works of the native literature, concealed the death of his master, asserting that the latter had retired, in mystic meditation or trance, to the upper chambers of the palace. The government continued to be carried on in the lama’s name by the regent, who leagued with Galdan Khan of Dzungaria against the Chinese (Manchu) power. It was not till the great emperor Kang-hi was marching on Tibet that the death of the lama, sixteen years before, was admitted. A solemn funeral was then performed, at which 108,000 lamas assisted, and a new incarnation was set up in the person of a youth of fifteen, Tsangs-yang Gyamtso. This young man was the scandal of the Lamaist Church in every kind of evil living and debauchery, so that he was deposed and assassinated in 1701. But it was under him and the regent Sangye Gyamtso that the Potala palace attained its present scale of grandeur, and that most of the other great buildings of Lhasa were extended and embellished.

For further history and bibliography, see. Consult also .

 L’HÔPITAL (or ), MICHEL DE (c. 1505–1573), French statesman, was born near Aigueperse in Auvergne (now Puy-de-Dôme). His father, who was physician to the constable Charles of Bourbon, sent him to study at Toulouse, whence at the age of eighteen he was driven, a consequence of the evil fortunes of the family patron, to Padua, where he studied law and letters for about six years. On the completion of his studies he joined his father at Bologna, and afterwards, the constable having died, went to Rome in the suite of Charles V. For some time he held a position in the papal court at Rome, but about 1534 he returned to France, and becoming an advocate, his