Frequently Tibetan merchants fare attacked by robbers and from what T can hear the robbers Jalmost every case have been heavily Jdefeated. "Quite recently. on the Zhara-la (15,000 feet high) a num ber of Tibetan merchants put to; {fight several hundred brigands.
Apparently one of the very first things a trader does on arriving in Tachienla is to purchase a brand new, foreign felt hat; the more conspicuous the colour the happier the Tibetan seems to feel. Among the Tibetan merchants walking about, the town the chief style in dress seems to be foreign boots, putties, a very light coloured foreign felt hat and a. big heavy wool-skin garment. Dressed thus he feels aa happy as a bird and shows Jevery line of his countenance. The market affects him very little. "All right," he says, "charge me more for my tea and I will charge you more {for your musk." Who gains or loses? Apparently he does not trouble himself to ask. Happy as the days are flong. Tachienlu is a nice place live in, and he only visits the Chinese border perhaps once a year, so why. let the state of the market or the} price of Chinese tea spoil a good holiday; "A-visit out-of the north and south city gates to the rendezvous of the yak shows enormous. quantities of tea, all carefully packed up in yak skins, ready to be carried to all parts of the land of the lamas. Th Jcasual visitor would simply conclude that all the Tibetans exist on is Chinese ten. Mixed with their Chinese tea is no small quantity of rancid yak butter and to nullify the dark red tea and the hard, odorous butter the woolly Tibetar mixes a little tsamba (barley flour) and goes on his way among the wonderful mountains and grasslands in lamaland,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.