1936 - 1937 Mission Diary

The official diary of the Gould mission to Lhasa sent by the British government. Read more about the mission diary.

November 29th, Sunday.

see photographs below

In the afternoon several of us crossed the Kyi Chu by an ancient and dangerously leaky ferry and rode out to explore six or seven miles a ruined fort to the West of Lhasa.

In the very heart of the ruin we found a secret temple of the Bon religion, a pre-Buddhist form of devil-worship. In an outer room was a collection of animals crudely stuffed with straw and suspended from the ceiling. They included a dog, a sheep, a snow leopard, a musk-deer, a gazzle, and a shau (Sikkim stag). In an inner room, so obviously in recent use that we thought a monk was actually hiding there, were devil-traps and a variety of hideous images.

In the evening we listened to Gould's talk on the traderoutes of Sikkim and Tibet, which was being broadcast from Delhi.

Author: Frederick Spencer Chapman [see handwritten annotations in Diary by Hugh Richardson in MS. Or. Richardson 2, Bodleian Libary, Department of Oriental Collections, University of Oxford]

Page Reference: Pt X p.1