Note 21 — Chapter II · RESIDENCE AT TASHILHUNPO.

The new cook has proved no improvement on Phurchung; he is a sloven, and though I promised him a reward for cleanliness, he neither washed his face nor cleaned his teeth,21 and always smelled most offensively. Finally I got Phurchung to make him wash his clothes and face. Our breakfast usually consisted of a few pieces of bread, tea, and one or two cups of a thin paste made of boiled tsamba, mutton, and dried milk, and called yatug. In the evening I met the Tung-chen, the minister’s secretary, and talked to him about getting the lithographic press here. Two of his friends were sitting with him, one of them engaged in munching a piece of boiled mutton. He told me that the Tung-chen had toothache, caused by worms in the root of a tooth, and could only eat hashed or pounded meat. The secretary showed me the cavities made, he said, by thread-shaped worms (ringpa). He had killed several, he added, by inserting red-hot pins in the cavities.22