at which Her Majesty was present.  It was not wholly successful, for a week or two later he officiated at her funeral.  At the end of 1908 he left for Lhasa.  He visited India in 1910 but this created dissatisfaction at Peking.  In the same year[969] a decree was issued deposing him from his spiritual as well as his temporal powers and ordering the Agents to seek out a new child by drawing lots from the golden urn.  This decree was probably ultra vires and certainly illogical, for if the Chinese Government recognized the Lama as an incarnation, they could not, according to the accepted theory, replace him by another incarnation before his death.  And if they regarded him as a false incarnation, they should have ordered the Agents to seek out not a child but a man born about the time that the last Grand Lama died.  At any rate the Tibetans paid no attention to the decree.

The early deaths of Grand Lamas in the nineteenth century have naturally created a presumption that they were put out of the way and contemporary suspicion accused the regent in 1838.  There is no evidence that the deaths of the other three were regarded as unnatural but the earlier Grand Lamas as well as the abbots of Tashilhunpo lived to a good age.  On the other hand the Grand Lamas of Urga are said to die young.  If the pontiffs of some lines live long and those of others die early, the inference is not that the life of a god incarnate is unhealthy but that in special cases special circumstances interfere with it, and on the whole there are good grounds for suspecting foul play.  But it is interesting to note that most Europeans who have made the acquaintance of high Lamas speak in praise of their character and intelligence.  So Manning (the friend of Charles Lamb) of the ninth Grand Lama (1811), Bogle of the Tashi Lama about 1778, Sven Hedin of his successor in 1907, and Waddell of the Lama Regent in 1904.

The above pages refer to the history of Lamaism in Tibet and Mongolia.  It also spread to China, European Russia, Ladak, Sikhim and Bhutan.  In China it is confined to the north and its presence is easily explicable by the genuine enthusiasm of Khubilai and the encouragement given on political grounds by the Ming and Manchu dynasties.  Further, several Mongol towns such as Kalgan and Kuku-khoto are within the limits of the eighteen provinces.

The Kalmuks who live in European Russia are the descendants of tribes who moved westwards from Dzungaria in the seventeenth century.  Many of them left Russia and returned to the east in 1771, but a considerable number remained behind, chiefly between the Volga and the Don, and the population professing Lamaism there is now reckoned at about 100,000.