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36 THE GRAND LAMA AND HIS EVOLUTION [chap. the Government out of Chinese leading-strings by a dramatic coup d'etat.

When in 1894 he reached the tragic age of eighteen years, which from experience of the ill-fate of his predecessors had come to be regarded as the limit of a Dalai's life, his friends by a stratagem obtained the seals of office from the Regent, whom they then imprisoned in a monastery, where he shortly after died. Having become possessed of the seals, the Dalai Lama seized the reins of government, and deprived the Chinese Ambans of any say in the State. The discomfited Ambans procured a peremptory edict from Peking ordering the seals to be returned and the Regent to be reinstated in office. Meanwhile, with the Regent dead or murdered, a new Amban had come to Lhasa, and he was bribed heavily to let matters remain as they were. So he suppressed the edict, never delivering it, whilst leading Peking to believe it had been complied with.

Afterwards, the opportunist young Dalai, profiting by China's loss of prestige from her defeat by Japan in 1895 and by the allied armies in 1900, openly refused to be guided by the Chinese, who now have to admit the decline of their power in Tibet, and the undisguised contempt in which the Tibetans have come to regard their authority, which is reduced to an empty farce, the shadow of a shade. So much had this become the case two years ago that the Chinese viceroy of the western province of Sze-chuan, which adjoins Tibet, asked the Peking authorities to send an army to Lhasa to make Chinese power respected.

The present young Dalai Lama bears the title of "The Eloquent Noble-minded T'ūb-dän" (Nag-wang Lobsang T'ūb-dän Gyamtsho). Temporal sovereign of Tibet, his spiritual sway extends through Tibet, along the Himalayan Buddhist States from Bhotan to Ladak, and thence to Lake Baikal, to Mongolia, and a