BANQUET WITH LAMA.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 16 July 1925, Page 9

BANQUET WITH LAMA.

INCENSE—AND 67 COURSES. Europeans at Shanghai wore recently given a bizarre glimpse of the ceremony surrounding the Panchan Lama, head of Far Eastern Buddhism, who spent a few days in Shanghai en route to Lhassa. He was invited by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and other Chinese organisations to a reception,'which was a strange mixture of civic* hospitality and ecclesiastical pomp. Incense rose* from a bronze bowl, flanked by flowers, set- in the middle of an altarlike table draped in yellow, behind which the Lama sat on a platform similarly draped—the incense rising beneficently above the victoriously pungent vapour of 30[> plates of soup, the first of 67 courses whereof the guests were invited to partake at the hour of afternoon tea.

The Lama himself wa,s dressed togalike in a robe of claret colour; his Tibetan suite were variously clothed in monkish gowns of yellow and chocolate, oddly surmounted by grey squash hats of European make. Addresses, written in Chinese characters on yellow scrolls, were read from below the altar at the foot of the massed flowers. To these the Lama replied in guttural and scarcely audible accents, Tibetans at the same time distributing blue silk scarves to the leading hosts. Through interpreters he intimated, amid a respectful murmur of applause, that Tibet regarded itself as part of the Chinese Republic—the glint of the fixed bayonets of the plentiful Chinese guards at the banqueting hall’s portals lending an innocent touch of militancy to this pontifical recognition of Far Eastern democracy, which, as represented by six long tables of Shanghai’s leading personalities, watched with piety and becomiiiq; decorum the kotows of the Lama’s yellow-clad entourage.