47-t Route of two Nepalese Embassies to Pekin. [No. 6. 



ambassador, who usually reaches Pekin about the middle of the 

 following January. The ambassador's suit is rigidly fixed as to 

 number and as to every other detail ; and, well or ill, tired or not, 

 his excellency is obliged by his pragmatical Chinese conductor 

 (perhaps we should add in candour, by the character also of the 

 country to be traversed) to push on towards his destination with 

 only one halt of about a month and half at Lhasa, where, luckily 

 for him, there is always some necessary business to transact, the 

 Nepalese having long had commercial establishments in that city. 

 The ambassador, who is always a man of high rank (Hindu of 

 course) and rather advanced in life, can take his own time, and cook 

 and eat his own food, and use his own comfortable sedan chair or 

 more comfortable litter (dandi, hammock) as far as Tingri. But 

 there the inexorable Chinese Mehmandar (honorary conductor) 

 meets him with the assigned set of ponies for himself and suit, and 

 his excellency must now mount and unceasingly as inflexibly pursue 

 his journey through a country lamentably deficient in food, fuel, and 

 water, by pretty long stages and without a halt save that above 

 named, on horse-back, over a very rough country, for some one 

 thousand seven hundred miles, and then only exchange his pony 

 for the still worse conveyance of a Chinese carriage (more properly, 

 cart) which is to convey him with like persistency some seven 

 hundred miles further, fatigue and bad weather notwithstanding, 

 and the high caste Hindu's cuisine (horresco referens) all the while 

 entirely in the hands of filthy Bhotias and as filthy Chinese! Of 

 course there is a grand lustration after each embassy's return home, 

 which usually happens about two years from the time of its depar- 

 ture for Pekin ; and many a sad and moving story (but all reserved 

 for friends) the several members of these embassies then have to 

 tell of poisonous compounds of so-called tea* and rancid lard or 

 suet, given them for drink in lieu of their accustomed pure lymph 

 or milk ; of heaps of sun-dried flesh incessantly substituted for the 

 farinaceous and vegetable food of all decent Pagans ; nay, of puppies 

 served up to them for kids, and cats for hares, by stolid beastly cooks 

 of Bhot (Tibet) under the orders of a seemingly insouciant and 



* The so-called brick tea which is composed of the sweepings of the tea manu- 

 factories cemented by some coarse kind of gluten. 



