CHAPTER VI
TACHIENLU
TACHIENLU is surely sui generis; there can be no other town quite like it. Situated eight thousand four hundred feet above the sea, it seems to lie at the bottom of a well, the surrounding snow-capped mountains towering perhaps fifteen thousand feet in the air above the little town which, small as it is, has hardly room to stand, while outside the wall there is scarcely a foot of level ground. It is wedged into the angle where three valleys come together, the Tar and the Chen rivers meeting just below the town to form the Tarchendo, and our first view of the place as we turned the cliff corner that here bars the gorge, was very striking, grey walls and curly roofs standing out sharply from the flanking hillsides.
Within the walls of Tachienlu, China and Tibet meet. As we made our way through the long, dirty main street, here running parallel with the Tar which comes tumbling down from the snow-fields of the Tibetan range, I was struck at once by the varied aspect of the people. The dense crowd that surged through the streets, some on horseback and some on foot, was more Tibetan than Chinese, but the faces
