TACHIENLU, THE GATE OF THIBET 213 



establishments. This custom of polyandry is characteristic 

 of Thibet, and the following note on the subject, written by a 

 friend who has spent many years of his life among these people, 

 is worthy of much thoughtful study : — 



" So many able men have written about polyandry that 

 what follows will be without interest to those who have studied 

 the system ; but to the great mass who are comparatively 

 unacquainted with Thibet and her customs these notes may be 

 of some value. The writer has spent several years among 

 Thibetans and cognate tribes, and has lived for months alone 

 on the wild steppes as well as in the more civilized and well- 

 cultivated valleys. 



" The term ' polyandry ' is here applied {a) to women living 

 permanently, and cohabiting legally, with more than one man ; 

 (5) to those who have been, or are, married temporarily to more 

 than one man or companies of men. 



" The former, true polyandry, is confined to the pastoral 

 nomads of the grassy plateaux ; the latter, quasi-polyandry, 

 is rampant in all the commercial and political centres on the 

 border and throughout Thibet. In both cases a low con- 

 ception of the relation of the sexes has made it possible ; and 

 climate and political conditions have made it desirable. 



" The past hints, and the present proves, that indifference 

 to female virtue connotes the people known as Thibetans 

 and tribes of common origin, and I understand it to be 

 the indirect cause of polyandry. From time immemorial the 

 Thibetan has been taught that the female is a kind of Pan- 

 dora's box, in which are all the evils that have cursed mankind. 

 AU down the ages woman seems to have been the slave of man : 

 dangerous because of latent evil, but also valuable on account 

 of her ability to render him service. In the old barbaric days, 

 when prowess was the prime virtue and a thoroughgoing 

 communism the rule, woman was only a tribal asset, like the 

 animals she tended. Then came religion, a deification of all 

 that rude minds could not explain. It was probably the 

 mysterious Bonpa of to-day which lingers in the lonely valleys 

 where nations meet, and which could have been no friend of 

 virtue if the accounts of orgies in its temples before indecent 

 idols are true, and the unseemly dress of young women and 



