The romance which Mr. Candler saw in the Potala, Mr. Landon found most conspicuously in the church of the Jo-kang. The palace was magnificent from the outside, but within it was only a warren of small rooms and broken stairways. The great cathedral, on the other hand, was hidden away among trees and streets, so that its golden roof could only be seen from a distance, but inside it was a shrine of all that was mysterious and splendid. The contrast was allegorical of the difference between the temporal ruler of Lamaism--gaudy, tyrannical, and hollow--and the sway of the Buddhist Church, which by hidden ways and unseen agencies dominated the imagination of Asia. The Chinese Amban, having a natural desire to pay back the people who had so grossly neglected him, invited certain members of the Mission to enter this Holy of Holies. The visitors were the first white men to approach the inner sanctuary of the Buddhist faith. They were stoned on leaving the building, but the sight was one worth risking much to see. In the central shrine sat the great golden Buddha, roped with jewels, crowned with turquoise and pearl, surrounded by dim rough-hewn shapes which loomed out fitfully in the glare of the butter-lamps, while the maroon-clad monks droned their eternal chant before the silver altar. And the statue was as strange as its environment. "For this is no ordinary presentation of the Master. The features are smooth and almost childish; beautiful they are not, but there is no need of beauty here. There is no trace of that inscrutable smile which, from Mukden to Ceylon, is inseparable from our conception of the features of the Great Teacher. Here there is nothing of the saddened smile of the Melancholia, who has known too much and has renounced it all as vanity. Here, instead, is the quiet happiness and the quick capacity for pleasure of the boy who had never yet known either pain, or disease, or death. It is Gautama as a pure and eager prince, without any thought for the morrow or care for to-day."