Page:Three Years in Tibet.djvu/550

520 While I was staying in Lhasa a yellow paper, containing the Chinese Emperor's decree issued at the termination of the Boxer trouble, was hung up in the square of that city. The decree was addressed to all the eighteen provinces of China and all her protectorates. It warned the people under pain of severe penalty against molesting and persecuting foreigners, as they, the people, were too frequently liable to do from their ignorance of the state of affairs abroad and their misunderstanding of the motives of the foreigners who came to their respective districts. These foreigners, the decree continued, have really come to engage in industrial pursuits or in diffusing religion, and for other purposes beneficial alike to the people and themselves. In order to promote these aims of mutual benefit, the middle kingdom has been opened so as to allow foreigners freedom of travelling to any place they wish, and so, concluded the decree, this policy of welcome and hospitality should be adopted in all the provinces and protectorates.

Two other decrees of like import arrived afterwards and were similarly posted up, and I thought at that time that the allies must have entered Peking, and that this decree must have been issued as a result of the conclusion of peace between the Powers and China.

The decree, however, failed to produce any particular impression on the Tibetans. I asked a high Government official what Tibet was going to do with the order set forth in the decree, and whether the Tibetan Government, in the face of that injunction, could refuse, for instance, to allow Englishmen to enter the country. The official scornfully replied that his Government was not obliged to obey an order which the Chinese Emperor issued at his own pleasure. And besides it was highly doubtful whether the Emperor, who was an incarnation of a high saint, could have issued a decree of that nature, which he must have known to be utterly opposed to the interests and traditional