Page:Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet.djvu/14

 place. A passport was also brought Sarat Chandra by the lama, issued to him by the Prime Minister, by which a choice of roads to  enter Tibet was given him, and his safe conduct insured to Shigatse.

Armed with these credentials, Sarat Chandra set out for Tashilhunpo in June, 1879, accompanied by lama Ugyen-gyatso, and there he remained for nearly six months, the guest of the Prime Minister, with whose assistance he was able to make a careful examination of the rich collections of books in the great libraries of the convent, bringing back with him to India a large and valuable collection of works in Sanskrit and Tibetan. He also explored during this journey the country north and north-east of Kanchanjinga, of which nothing was previously known, noting with great care observations of bearing and distances. Not the least valuable result of this journey was, however, the friendly relations which the traveller was able to establish with the liberal and powerful Prime Minister, who, deeply interested in western civilization and its wonderful discoveries, of which he had learned much from the mouth of Sarat Chandra, requested him to come back again to Tashilhunpo, to instruct him further in the wonders of the west.

An account of this first journey was printed by the Bengal Government some time after the author's return, with a prefatory note by the traveller's friend, Sir Alfred Croft. As the route therein described is the same as that followed by the traveller in his second and more extended journey of 1881-82, and as the results of his studies in Tibet in 1879, as shown in this report, bear nearly exclusively on historical and religious subjects, it has been deemed advisable to omit it from the present publication, embodying in footnotes all such details as have been found in it bearing on the geography and ethnology of Tibet, and which are not in the later and fuller report.

The year 1880 was passed by Sarat Chandra at his home in Darjiling, working on papers on the history, religion, ethnology, and folk-lore of Tibet, drawn from the data collected during his journey. These papers, most of them of great value to Oriental students, have since appeared in the Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society and in that of the Buddhist Text Society of India, which Sarat Chandra founded in 1892, and of which he has since remained the secretary.