"The Calcutta correspondent. of the 'Morning Post," writing on December 3, & After two months' residence in Tibet, including a fortnight in Lhasa, Mr. J. Fairley, telegraph engineer to the Government of India, on special duty, has just returned to Indi. Mr. Fairley was received in audience by the Dalai Lama at his capital, andi he is the first Englishman—indeed, the first European—to whom that experience has fallen since Manning in 1811. Mr. Fairley ig also the first Englishman to enter Lhasa, since the return of the Younghusband expedition in 1904.
The. most astonishing feature of Mr. Fairley's visit was the fact that it was from first to last an entirely peaceful expedition. He went—as Mr. Bell, a political agent of the Government of India, has gone since—at the suggestion of the Tibetan Government. In conversation with your correspondent, Mr. Fairley expressed his surprise, however, that nowhere was there a visible trace of the old notion that Tibet is a "forbidden" land.
"When I_ received orders to proceed to. Lhasa," he said, "my first thoughts were that I should have to produce my passport at every turn, and that an armed guard would be necessary in order to get through at all. However, from the day I left Chumbi—the first place of any importance over the border—I had no trouble whatever: my passport was never looked at, and the welcome extended at every village exceeded any—thing experienced during my 38 years in India. From first to last the Tibetans showed themselves the kindliest and most inoffensive people I have ever come across. The only foreign race of whom they ever spoke with the smallest degree of rancour were the Gurkhas, on their southern border, and for that there seems to be a satisfactory historical explanation."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.