Here is a remarkable read: With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple: Narrative of Four Years' Residence on the Tibetan Border, and of a Journey Into the Far Interior, by Susie Carson Rijnhart, M.D. The dates are 1895-1899, which causes some revision on our "first" lists. Seems they left America for Tibet in 1894.
Unfortunately, this book was written by a Christian missionary. That she rather tragically lost her husband and only child on this venture did not soften her view of Buddhism in general and Tibetan people in particular. Still, I do not perceive her as a fanciful liar, and while the picture she paints of the Tibetans and their lamas is less than flattering, it is interesting nonetheless.
The whole book is online here. Definitely worth a visit.
1 reader comments:
Another less known traveler was the Finnish baron C.G. Mannerheim, whom the Russian Czar sent to a military reconnaissance journey to northern parts of China in 1906-08. Mannerheim combined the trip with ethnographical interests, sending back, among others, Buddhist manuscripts from Tibetan border areas. http://idp.bl.uk/pages/collections_other.a4d
Tibetans were genuinely inhospitable those days. The monks at Labrang monastery threw stones at him, and Tanguts (If I remember correctly) once gave him a sleeping place in a leper's house (Mannerheim noticed this only the next morning, after having slept there. The incubation period for leprosy can be decades, so this kept him in an uncertainty for a long time).
Mannerheim met the 12th Dalai Lama in 1908 ,towards the end of his journey. He was out of presents, and gave the Dalai Lama a pistol, saying "the times are such, that even a holy man might need such a thing".
- Konchog
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