April 1999

On October 6, 1939, on the outskirts of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, Hugh Richardson, who is now ninety-three and the West’s foremost living Tibetanist, saw the arrival in the city of the five-year-old boy who in early 1940 would be installed as the fourteenth Dalai Lama. It was the end of a three-month journey by palanquin from the boy’s village in eastern Tibet, where he had been identified as the incarnation of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, who had died on December 17, 1933.