at Bhot Bag an in Howrah. 
91 
1890.] 
to the undisturbed security of life and property under the British raj 
at that time. This occurred most probably in the early part of 1795, the 
date of the consecration of the tomb being the 23rd Vaisakha of 1202, 
3rd May 1795. At this time his age is said to have been not less 
than fifty years, a statement which harmonises with the fact, which 
Mr. Bogle has incidentally noticed in his narrative, that Puran Gir, when 
he first saw him, that is in 1774, was a young man. 
Thus ended the life of the great Puran Gir Gosain, the Bhot Bagan 
mahant, the linguist, traveller, religionist, and merchant, the first and the 
only ambassador of the Tashi Lama sent to Bengal, the guide and material 
helper of the British missions to Tibet, the companion of the Lama in his 
journey to China, where in the court of Peking he stood before the Em- 
peror, and perhaps in Chinese described to him the grandeur of the Raj 
of Hindustan ruled by a great king of the name of Hastings Sahib who 
was solicitous to open a friendly and commercial intercourse between 
Bengal and Tibet and his empire, and lastly, the man who exhibited 
such strong and repeated instances of his ability, intelligence, intrepe- 
dity and faithfulness as to be appointed, by that keen-sighted statesman 
Warren Hastings, the sole envoy accredited to the court of Tashi 
Lhunpo in 1785. 
One may be excused in indulging a hope that had this Gosain’s 
life been prolonged, he would no doubt have succeeded, with officers 
of the style of Bogle, Turner and Hodgson, to open that desirable com- 
mercial intercourse between the Himalayan states generally, and spe- 
cially the commerce-promoting, peace-loving and peace and knowledge- 
seeking Tibet, on the one hand, and the Indian provinces on the other, 
and saved that trouble, expense, and waste of energy which our Govern- 
ment, under one policy or other, is, up to this time, undergoing to attain 
that great object 
Daljit Gir Gosain mahant, the chela and successor of Pdran Gir, 
formally reported the melancholy news of his death to the Government. 
Sharp was the enquiry and quick the vindication of justice that follow- 
e d : — four dakoits expiated their guilt on the gallows, erected in the 
Bhot Bagan itself. 
The pious Daljit lost no time in performing the funeral rites of 
his guru or spiritual teacher, whose corpse was laid in a coffin in a sitting 
posture, as was the case with the Tashi Lama’s dead body, and interred 
in a place behind the main portion of the math. A samddhi stambha 
or tomb was raised over the grave with the already mentioned inscrip- 
tion in the Bengali language and character, and the structure was 
crowned at the top with the phallus emblem of Mahadeva, into whose 
spirit, as the inscription describes, that of Puran Gir was absorbed. In 
