Great Wise Priest

A good little man with a drooping mustache, a little round head and a little round stomach was moving across Manchuria last week in a bright yellow private car, with a brand new contract in his baggage. Every time the train stopped hundreds of devout Chinese banged their heads against the sides, the window panes, the brake rods, hoping to receive virtue through their bumps. The good little man was the Panchen Lama who has sometimes been called the Buddhist Pope.* His contract was with the Nationalist Government of President Chiang Kai-shek to become a public relations counselor to fight Soviet propaganda, explain the Nationalist Government to the Manchurian masses. In return for this the Panchen Lama receives a new title: "Great Wise Priest Who Guards the Nation and Spreads Culture." and $480,000 ($2,160,000 Mex.) a year. $120,000 for himself and entourage, and $30,000 a month extra for "administrative expenses."

At that, Finance Minister T. V. Soong/- thought he was getting a bargain. Though the Panchen Lama speaks only Tibetan, knows less Chinese than most U. S. missionaries, he is the only person in China allowed to use imperial yellow since the downfall of the monarchy. When he arrived in Peiping recently to sign his contract, he was received with royal honors by President Chiang and his northern ally Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, waited on hand & foot by Mongol princes who ordinarily have no traffic with Chinese republicans or any of their fiestas.

So great is the influence of the Great-Wise -Priest -Who -Guards-the-Nation-&-Spreads-Culture that the Nationalists are counting on him to bring back to China the rich province of Manchuria now split between Russian and Japanese spheres of influence.

*Until 1924 Buddhists in Tibet, Mongolia & China looked up to two Lamas or Living Buddhas: the Panchen Lama or spiritual head of Buddhism, and the Dalai Lama or temporal ruler. Squabbling between these two holy men (fostered, said some observers, by British agents who found the Dalai Lama much more tractable) caused the Panchen Lama to flee from his headquarters in Tibet to China where he travels about, oblivious to and unharmed by all civil wars.

/-Anglicized Shanghai rendering of Sung Tsu-wen, preferred by Minister Soong.

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