A Strange Omission

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 21, 26 May 1904, Page 18

A Strange Omission

Sairey Gamp, when she met the newly-wedded couple in Dickens's ' Martin Chuzzlewit,* had one eye on their visiting card and the other eye an futurity. Just now the newspaper magaizines have one eye on Manchuria and the other on Tibet. We have articles and sketches galore on the scenery, the sport, the domestic customs, and the religion of Tibet-— the highest and most mountainous nation on the face of the planet. But— strange omission— we have not yet come across, in the course of over two score articles on the Himalayan kingdom, even a passing reference to the fact that our first and best knowledge of that mysterious country and its people came to the world through the work of' intrepid Catholic missionaries 1 . We owe, for instance, a map of Chinese Tibet, that is not yet superseded, to Jesuit missionaries who some two-hundred years ago—in the early part of the eighteenth century— guided anid instructed the Lamias in a survey of that region. In 1844 the celebrated Piench Vincentian missionaries, Fathers Hluc and Gabet, attended by only a single Chinese

Christian concert, orossed the dreaded desert of Gobi anld penetrated, in search of souls, the then unknown land of Tibet. On one wild and wintry January day m 1846 they reached its capital, the sacred city of Lhassa. They immediately started a mission and set to wo:k to preach the Gospel of Christ to the pagan population. Success promptly attended their efforts. They maide a number of converts. And then came sudden disaster. At the instigation of the Chinese Amban or Resident at Lhassa, the missionaries were deported to Canton. Twenty of theii converts won the crown 01 martyrdom. Father Hue returned to his native Pans in 1852 utterly wrecked in health— the mere battered ribs and timbers of a man. But several years befogs he diod he gave to the- world one of the most fasciniting books of travel yet written— the two-volume story of hisj long toilsome missionary journeyings through Tartary, Tibet, and China. It still remains, and wll long remain, a classic. Even healthy eyes have what is cakled a ' blind spot.' And the blind spot in the eyes of writers on Tibet seems to be turned, with curious persistency, cm the valuable records which Catholic missionaries have left of that strange country and its strange people.