An Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet - Prajna Quest

;34STIBET.l^erpallng, the Annees rise to their orisons, chant their mid-day mass,and having concluded their vespers, retire to their soHtary cells.This association of nuns had often been mentioned to me, but in thecourse of my travels I had never yet seen one of them before, thoughmany were said to be existing at that time, in various parts of Tibet.I would gladly have gone to visit these devotees in their secludedstation, but itwas at some distance from our road, and the loss of timedissuaded me from the attempt.Though nuns, the admission of malevisitors among them during the day, is not prohibited ;but no male isever suffered to pass a night within the walls that enclose the Annees,any more than a female is, within those that surround the Gylongs.That they should be thus drawn, in such multitudes, to thesesolitaryretreats, from the business and the pleasures of the world, willless excite our surprise, when we reflect on the peculiar custom thatprevails, with regard to the union of the sexes, in Tibet ;a custom, atonce different from ihe modes of Europe, Avhere one female becomesthe wife of one male; and opposite to the practice of Asia, at least ofvery great part of it, where one male assumes an uncontrolled despotismover nvany females, limiting his connexion with wives and concubinesonly by the extent of his resources.Here we find a practiceequally strange, that of polyandry, if I may so call it, universallyprevailing; and see one female, associating her fate and fortune withall the brothers of a family, without any restriction of age, or ofnumbers. The choice of a wife, is the privilege of the elder brotherand singular as it may seem, I have been assured, that a Tibetianwife is as jealous of her connubial rites, though thus joined to a