Page:Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet.djvu/16

 seemed absolutely necessary to make the narrative connected, are published in the present volume.

In 1885, when the Government of India contemplated sending a mission to Tibet, and the late Honourable Colman Macauley was sent by it to Peking to obtain the necessary authorization of the Chinese Government to the projected embassy, Sarat Chandra accompanied him to the Chinese capital, where he remained several months in the early part of the year. It was during this visit to Peking that I became acquainted with the Babu, to whom I felt strongly drawn by my lifelong interest in Tibetan studies. Sarat Chandra lived, while at Peking, in the lamasery outside the An-ting gate, known as the Hsi Huang ssu, and in which all Tibetan traders stop when at Peking. He wore the dress common to lamas in China, and was always called the "Ka-che lama," or "the lama from Kashmir." His knowledge of Tibetan, his extensive travels, and his courteous manners gained for him the friendship of many of the lamas, among others of the Chang-chia Hutuketu, the Metropolitan of the lama church in China. Had the mission ever been sent to Tibet, it was understood that Sarat Chandra was to accompany it, and he would have rendered it valuable service; but the project was abandoned, and since then the Babu has bent all his energies to the publication of Tibetan texts and to the preparation of other works on Buddhism while living in Darjiling, where he holds the position of Tibetan translator to the Government of Bengal.

The services he rendered Mr. Macauley while in Peking were deemed, however, of such value by the Indian Government, that on his return to Bengal he was given the title of Rai Bahadur, and created a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire, and in 1887 the Royal Geographical Society awarded him the "Back Premium" for his geographical researches.

The amount of literary work accomplished by Sarat Chandra since his return from Tibet in 1883 is enormous in bulk, and its value to students cannot be over-estimated. He brought back with him from his travels over two hundred volumes, manuscripts or block-prints, obtained from the great libraries in Tibet, a number of them in Sanskrit, and for many centuries past lost in India. From these