Commodities are either bartered or bought with regular coins. I should more strictly say the coin, there being only one kind of coin, and that is a twenty-four sen silver piece. That is the only legal tender current. Transactions have to be conducted therefore in a rather complicated manner, inasmuch as that coin admits of being divided in two ways only. In the first place it may be cut into two, thereby producing two twelve-sen pieces; or it may be divided into a ? piece and a ? piece, the former passing at sixteen sen and the latter at eight. The cutting is far from being exact, and cut pieces are in most cases perforated in the centre or worn down at the edges. These however are passed and received without complaint.

In Lhasa and other prosperous places the unit of transactions is four sen, but there being no four-sen piece one must take with him in making a purchase of four sen one ? piece valued at sixteen sen, and receive in return for it one ½ piece valued at twelve sen. When the seller happens not to possess this one-half piece, the buyer then produces one ½ piece and one ? piece, and receives in return for the two one whole piece called a tanka which is valued at twenty-four sen. For a purchase of eight sen a buyer produces one tanka and receives a ? piece in change.

The unit of transaction being four sen there are six gradations of value between this minimum and a tanka, each possessing a distinct denomination. Thus four sen is called a khakang, eight sen a karma, twelve sen a chyekka, sixteen sen a shokang, twenty sen a kabchi and twenty-four sen a tanka.

In less prosperous places, and indeed everywhere except in Lhasa and Shigatze, it is impossible to make a purchase of less than one tanka, owing to be the absence of divided pieces of smaller value.

In some places are found silver pieces which are locally circulated, as in the north-western steppes which form the boundary line between Tibet and India. These pieces are semi-circular in shape, but are not accepted in the Grand Lama’s dominions.

Here I should like to recount what occurred to me in my monetary dealings. It was not an ordinary transaction, but a sort of blackmail carried out at my expense.

I have spoken before of the prodigal son of the house of Para. One day this man sent his servant to me with a letter and asked for a loan of money, rather a large sum for Tibet. Of course he had no idea of repaying me, and his loan was really blackmail. I sent back the servant with half of what he had asked, together with a letter. I was told that he was highly enraged at what I had done, exclaiming that I had insulted him, and that he had not asked for the sum for charity, and so on. At any rate he sent back the money to me, probably expecting that I would then send him the whole sum asked for. But I did not oblige him as he had expected, and took no notice of his threat. A few days after another letter reached me from that young man, again asking for the sum as at first. I decided to save myself from further annoyance and so I sent the sum. Like master, like servant; the latter, having heard most probably from his spendthrift master that I was a Japanese, came to me for a loan or blackmail of fifty yen. I gave that sum too, for I knew that they could not annoy me repeatedly with impunity.

About that time I chiefly devoted my leisure to collecting Bu??hist books, for I had a fairly large amount of money. I must remark here that Bu??hist works not in ordinary use are not sold by booksellers in Tibet; they are kept in the form of blocks at one monastery or another, and any person who wishes to get a copy of any of such works must obtain from the owner of the copyright permission to get an impression of it. In return for this permission an applicant has to forward some fee and some donation to the monastery which owns and keeps the particular set of blocks from which he wishes to get an impression or impressions, this donation generally consisting of a quantity of tussore silk. The fee, more or less differing in rate according to monasteries and kind of blocks, ranges from about twenty-five sen to about one yen twenty sen per hundred sheets. The permission obtained, the applicant next engages either three or six printers, two printers and one assorter forming a special printing party, so to say. Wages for the men are generally fifty sen a day without board, and as they work in a very dilatory manner, the cost of printing is rather heavy. The paper used in printing is of native origin, made of a certain plant, the leaves and roots of which are poisonous. The roots are white and produce excellent tough fibres. The Tibetan paper is therefore sufficiently strong and durable, but is not white, owing to bad bleaching.

Booksellers in Tibet, at least so far as I observed at Lhasa, do not sell their books at their own houses, but at open stalls in the courtyard in front of the western door of the great temple-shrine of the Bu??ha Shakyamuni, called Cho Khang. I saw ten such bookstalls in Lhasa and two or three at the bazaar in Shigatze, and those stallkeepers arranged their stock in trade in heaps instead of leaving their books open to invite inspection, as booksellers of other countries do.

The books which I collected either through purchase, or by getting special impressions from the original blocks, were at first kept in my room at the Sera monastery, and my collection was a subject of wonder and curiosity to the priests who were quartered in the rooms not far from my own. The collection, they were heard saying to each other, contained three times as many books as even a learned doctor possessed in Tibet, and they could not but wonder how I, a student from a remote country, could carry home so many books. I therefore kept all my subsequent purchases in my room at the house of my host, in order to avoid suspicion.

Meanwhile the end of the month of December drew near and at last the New Year’s eve arrived. I made an arrangement to keep the day according to the Japanese custom. Accordingly I sent my boy to the Sakya Temple in the city with clarified butter to make an offering of light to the Bu??ha enshrined in the edifice. This is done by putting clarified butter into the gold lamps placed before the tabernacle. Any one who wishes to make this offering has simply to pay in the usual charge of two tanka to the keepers of the edifice, and on that particular occasion I therefore sent my boy with two tanka pieces.

I arranged my own room in a manner suitable to the occasion. I hung a roll on which was painted an image of Bu??ha, set in front of it a tiny sacred tabernacle, then three stands of silver lamps, and lastly various offerings. After the preliminary service had been concluded, I began, after the hour of midnight, a regular service and kept it up till four in the morning of the New Year’s Day. Then I performed a ceremony in order to pray for the prosperity of their Imperial Majesties the Emperor and Empress, H. I. H. the Crown Prince, and also for the greater prosperity and glory of the Empire of Japan. I thought that during the three thousand years that had elapsed since the founding of the Empire this must be the first time that one of its own subjects had offered such a prayer in that city of the Forbidden Land; then a strange sensation came over me, and somehow I felt grateful tears rising in my eyes.

As I turned my eyes outward, while continuing the service, I noticed the New Year’s sun beginning to ascend in the eastern sky, reflecting its golden rays on the snow that covered the surrounding hills and plains. Nearer before my eyes and in the spacious court of the monastery, several snow-white cranes were stalking at leisure, now and then uttering their peculiar cry. The whole scene was exquisite and quite captivating; how I should have liked to invite my own countrymen to come and share this pleasure with me! The service, the thought about my dear home, the snow-scene, the cranes, and the New Year’s Day—these roused in me a chain of peculiar sentiments at once delightful and sad, and this strange association of thoughts I embodied on that occasion in a couple of awkward utas freely rendered into prose thus:—

“Here on this Roof of the World and amidst the ascending dawn heralded by the cry of the cranes, I glorify the long and prosperous reign of our sovereign liege who reigns over his realm in the Far East.

“I hear in the garden of the holy seat the voice of the pure-white cranes, glorifying the triumph of the Holy Religion.”