Note 2 — Chapter IV · RESIDENCE AT TASHILHUNPO, AND PREPARATIONS FOR JOURNEY TO LHASA.

At noon Ugyen visited the market-place, where he witnessed a quarrel between a woman and a Khamba over a tanka’s worth of tsamba, in the course of which the woman challenged the man to take an oath very common in Tibet, namely, that if he told an untruth, he might never see the Grand Lama’s face. The people of Khams are a fierce race who infest the solitudes of Tibet, and generally carry on depredations on the isolated villages north of Lhasa. They are a dangerous class.2