1 JULY 1871, Page 21

WESTERN CHINA AND THIBET.*

TirE practicability of an overland route for travel and traffic between the south-west part of China and British Burinah has long been discussed. But Mr. Cooper, being more especially interested in the commercial improvement of Calcutta than of Rangoon, sought a passage directly westward. His starting-point in this enterprise was the head of the navigation of the great Yang-tze-Kiang, which has lately been surveyed by Consul Swin- hoe's expedition, several hundred miles above the treaty port of Hankow, to the most central point in the vast Chinese Empire. Farther west, through the province of Szechuen, lies the ordinary road, by the frontier town of Ta-teian-loo, to Lithang and Bathang, in Thibet, on the way to Lassa, the capital of that secluded eccle- siastical dominion. Diverging from this road, at Bathang, to a more south-westerly course, the traveller would enter the valley of the Brahreapootra, and pass on through Assam to Bengal. This was what Mr. Cooper attempted in 1868, intending to leave the more southerly Chinese province of Yunnan, which adjoins Bar- mah, on his left hand far behind him. But he was prevented, by Chinese and Thibetan official intrigues, from passing beyond Bathang in a westerly direction, and was forced down into Yunnan, where he suffered imprisonment and threats of death. Last year he made another effort to get into Thibet from the opposite side, coming from Assam north-eastward to Bathang, but was again turned back. It is the first of those two expeditions that he relates in the very interesting book which we commend to our readers. lie was indebted to Mr. James Hogg and Mr. Charles Winchester, of Shanghai, M. Lamonier, director of the French Roman Catholic missions in China, Monseigneur Desflaches, the missionary bishop at Chung-Ching, and Monseigneur Chauvesu, the Vicar Apostolic in Thibet, for much kind and useful help. Independently, however, making his way on with scarcely enough money to pay his necessary expenses, and with a Chinese vice- roy's passport which was belied by secret counter-orders, Mr. Cooper was a man well able to help himself. His simple, unboast- ing narrative of all that lie wont through beyond the limit of Chinese civilization, affords a good example of the courage, the patience, the prudence, and the ready invention or ready action which are needful among barbarous people. He seems to have dealt with them everyw here in a frank and friendly spirit, avoiding • Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce in Pigtail and Petticoats; or, an Overland Journey from China towards India. 13y Thurnam Thomas Cooper, late Agent for the Cham- ber of Cowman° at Calcutta. Londou: John Murray.

many quarrels by his jolly good- humour, but refusing to be cheated, robbed, or bullied, and resorting to his own fists, whip, knife, or revolver for protection, when the danger was very praising. Happily, though lie now and then thrashed an insolent fellow, he killed nobody and nobody killed him, but he was sometimes very near it.

From Hankow to Chung-Ching, up the Yang-tze river and its tributary, is a boat voyage presenting many novelties of scenery and social or commercial prospects, which are described by other writers. The introduction of steamboats in those upper waters of China will probably do more than anything else can do for British trade, as well as for the benefit of the country. Szechuen, with its mercantile emporium, Chung-Ching, and its capital city, Chen-tu, besides the river-side towns of Swi-foo and Kiating, is a province which should deal freely with Great Britain, to their mutual advantage. We observe that Mr. Cooper, now in Eng- land, has lately given his testimony upou this subject before a Parliamentary Committee. It is thought desirable not only that English manufactures should be exchanged for Szechuen silks, teas, minerals, and drugs, but that Szechuen opium should no longer compete in China with the °plain of Bengal. There is yet another object to be attained, which Mr. Cooper thinks may hereafter compensate India even for the loss of the opium trade. The people of Thibet, who have gold and many other valuable pro- ducts to sell, want nothing so much as tea. It is estimated that they consume yearly six million pounds' weight of the Chinese leaf, the best quality of which is sold at Lassa for so much as 4s. Sd. the pound. The Assam planters, who are much nearer this market, could undersell the Chinese if once admitted. But the import of tea is a monopoly of the Church in Thibet ; the Lamas, priests, and monks forming a numerous and rich corporation, possessing their landed estates and tithes, like the clergy of medimval Europe, will hold fast the profits of the trade with China as long as they can. This was the true motive of the opposition to Mr. Cooper's journey. Nevertheless, his labour was by no means wasted ; for he proved by experience that the physi- cal difficulties of the road from China to Thibet are enormous, which is an encouragement to the hope of supplanting Chinese by Indian merchandise in the Thibet market.

The personal adventures of this gentleman, " Ta-Ing-qua-Tang Koopeah," or, " Cooper, the merchant of Great England," as he was styled in China, are varied and highly amusing. He wore the Chinese costume, "pig-tail and petticoats," with shaven face and spectacles, while among the Chinese ; and his vehicle on land, from Chung-Ching to the frontier town, was a closed wicker chair borne by two coolies. In Thibet, and afterwards iu Yunnan, he rode ponies or mules, dressed in an English pea-jacket and wide- awake hat. The Chinese population he liked better, the farther he went into the districts which preserve the moat of their native character and manners. Of the middle classes and the peasantry he speaks in terms of warm praise; and he admires the grand old system of Chinese civilization, political, industrial, and intellec- tual ; but the infamous corruption of the official classes, at least in the remote provinces of that much-disorganized empire, is shown up without reserve. It was in nothing more conspicuous than in the preposterous frauds and failures of the military administration, pretending to suppress the long-established Mohammedan revolt or conquest of Yunnan. An imaginary army of 40,000 soldiers, according to Imperial orders sent from Pekin, and the General's despatches from Chen-tu, was actually represented, for six months afterwards, by a few hundred lawless ruffians, without pay or command, infesting the villages of a loyal province, and despoiling the innocent people. The atrocious conduct of such local magis- trates as the mandarin of Weisee-foo, named Tien-Talowya, with two other mandarins conniving at his wickedness, from which Mr. Cooper but just escaped with life, was quite of a piece with the general bad character of Chinese government service. It is possible that the nominal rulers of the empire at Pekiu may be well-intentioned; but Sir Rutherford Alcock, who laid a complaint before them in November, 1868, of Mr. Cooper's ill- treatment, has not yet received any explanation. The people of China, by all accounts, are good and civil ; the people of Eastern Thibet, except a few savage mountaineers, seem to be honest and kindly, though rude. The devoted Christian zeal of the French missionaries has borne good fruit of moral culture. But it is yet more pleasing to read of the generous behaviour of untutored men, like the chief of the Mooquor tribe, the hospitable warrior La-won- van, at Comp, with his Ya-tsu allies, by whom Mr. Cooper was rescued from prison, and enabled safely to retrace his steps. Our Foreign Office should, perhaps through the British Commissioner of Burmah, or some other agency, send a letter of thanks and a gift to this bravo man, who is a reputed tributary of the Chinese Empire, but claims a virtual independence.

le traversing the mountain ranges, the Fee-qua-ling, within the Chinese border, the Tsanba and the Taso, near 13athang, and in crossing the river Lan-tsan, or descending its valley, parallel with that of the Salwen, the scenery which Mr. Cooper beheld was very wild and romantic, as is shown by some of his engraved sketches. But his party suffered much fatigue, cold, and hunger. The great. upland plain of Lithang, a Thibetan sheep-pasturb, where the air is too thin for a stranger to breathe in comfort, is a region that reminds us of some district beyond the American Rocky Moun- tains. Bathang, situated in a pleasant fertile valley,owhich should be less than thirty days' journey from Calcutta, is a town most

for our trade with Thibet ; and we may expect to hear much more of it from Indian comment and report. The Thibetans, as everybody knows, are enslaved by their curious superstition, that of the Buddhist Lamas, which is worth a careful study. Mr. Cooper was not allowed to enter the Grand Lamasery at Bathang, but ho saw its golden roof ; and in another establish- ment, at Ta-tsian-loo, he saw a hundred idols of solid gold. A third part of the nation's manhood is constantly employed in the service of the Church, whose most fre- quent observance is the revolution of the prayer-cylinders, and the portable hand-wheels, with the droning repetition of a mystic phrase, in adoration of the supreme deity. It would be instruc- tive to learn, if we could, from a sincere disciple of this religion what degree of spiritual faith and affection may be invested in so dull a form of worship. No truly wise or truly pions man would treat it with contempt, though he might not, like Mr. Cooper, in talking with the natives of the country, be satisfied to profess him- self a simple believer in the law of Con-fu-dzu, indifferent to all teaching of new faiths. That which is universally connected, be it true or false, with the natural hopes and fears of mortality, will insist upon a place in the earnest consideration of every benevolent observer. Births, deaths, and marriages, which make up so large a portion of human welfare and woe in any worldly condition, must suggest ideas of religious aspiration or sanction. The Thibetans, for instance, cut up the body of a dead friend into small pieces, which they lay on the top of a mountain ; that the buzzards, with every morsel of his flesh they carry high into the air, may convey a fraction of his soul but a little way nearer to heaven I Who could witness in a mood of indifference or of scornful ridicule (which is far from the temper of our author) such a quaint prac- tical confession of the desire to rise above this earthly life ? The traveller whose mind retains a healthy sensibility must feel some emotion on entering a village lately delivered from a pesti- lence, and seeing the houses decked with green boughs and wild flowers, the doorposts sprinkled with the blood of sacrificed fowls, the priests with litanies and hymns going in procession to the temples, followed by a people who thank their worshipped divinity for withdrawing the rod of sore affliction. We are obliged to Mr. Cooper for making us better acquainted with these nations of the interior of Eastern Asia. There is a good deal of human nature in them, after all. Every race, class, and state of mankind is worth understanding, and worth our respect and good-will.