Picturesque Villages,
Surrounded By Orchards, Adorn The Mountain Spurs; Chod-Tens And
Gonpos, With White Walls And Fluttering Flags, Brighten
The scene;
feudal castles crown the heights, and where the mountains are
loftiest, the snowfields and glaciers most imposing, and
The greenery
densest, the village of Kylang, the most important in Lahul as the
centre of trade, government, and Christian missions, hangs on ledges
of the mountain-side 1,000 feet above Bhaga, whose furious course can
be traced far down the valley by flashes of sunlit foam.
The Lahul valley, which is a part of British Tibet, has an altitude
of 10,000 feet. It prospers under British rule, its population has
increased, Hindu merchants have settled in Kylang, the route through
Lahul to Central Asia is finding increasing favour with the Panjabi
traders, and the Moravian missionaries, by a bolder system of
irrigation and the provision of storage for water, have largely
increased the quantity of arable land. The Lahulis are chiefly
Tibetans, but Hinduism is largely mixed up with Buddhism in the lower
villages. All the gonpos, however, have been restored and enlarged
during the last twenty years. In winter the snow lies fifteen feet
deep, and for four or five months, owing to the perils of the Rotang
Pass, the valley rarely has any communication with the outer world.
At the foot of the village of Kylang, which is built in tier above
tier of houses up the steep side of a mountain with a height of
21,000 feet, are the Moravian mission buildings, long, low,
whitewashed erections, of the simplest possible construction, the
design and much of the actual erection being the work of these
capable Germans. The large building, which has a deep verandah, the
only place in which exercise can be taken in the winter, contains the
native church, three rooms for each missionary, and two guest-rooms.
Round the garden are the printing rooms, the medicine and store room
(stores arriving once in two years), and another guest-room. Round
an adjacent enclosure are the houses occupied in winter by the
Christians when they come down with their sheep and cattle from the
hill farms. All is absolutely plain, and as absolutely clean and
trim. The guest-rooms and one or two of the Tibetan rooms are
papered with engravings from the Illustrated London News, but the
rooms of the missionaries are only whitewashed, and by their extreme
bareness reminded me of those of very poor pastors in the Fatherland.
A garden, brilliant with zinnias, dianthus, and petunias, all of
immense size, and planted with European trees, is an oasis, and in it
I camped for some weeks under a willow tree, covered, as many are,
with a sweet secretion so abundant as to drop on the roof of the
tent, and which the people collect and use as honey.
The mission party consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Shreve, lately arrived,
and now in a distant exile at Poo, and Mr. and Mrs. Heyde, who had
been in Tibet for nearly forty years, chiefly spent at Kylang,
without going home.
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