Tibet had always been a forbidden land, and, as a rule, adventurers only penetrated its fringes. Somewhere about the year 1328 a certain Friar Odoric of Pordenone, travelling from Cathay, is said to have entered Lhasa; and in the middle of the sixteenth century, Fernao Mendes Pinto may have reached it. In 1661 the Jesuits, Grueber and D'Orville, made a journey from Peking to Lhasa, and thence by way of Nepal into India. In the early part of the eighteenth century there was a temporary unveiling, and a Capuchin Mission was established in the Holy City. Various Jesuits also reached the place, notably one Desideri; and in 1730 came Samuel Van der Putte, a Doctor of Laws of Leiden, who stayed long enough to learn the language. In 1745 the Capuchin Mission came to an end, and the curtain descended. In 1774 George Bogle of the East India Company was in Tibet on a mission from Warren Hastings, but the first Englishman did not reach Lhasa till 1811, when Thomas Manning, of Caius College, Cambridge, a friend of Charles Lamb, arrived and stayed for five months on his unsuccessful journey from Calcutta to Peking. Till 1904 Manning was the solitary Englishman who was known for certain to have entered the sacred city, though there was a tale of one William Moorcroft reaching the place in 1826, and living there for twelve years in disguise. In 1844 the French missionaries, Huc and Gabet, reached Lhasa from China, and recorded their experiences in one of the most delightful of all books of travel. They were the last Europeans to have the privilege up to the entry of the British army. But throughout the last half of the nineteenth century Indian natives in the Government service were employed in the survey of Tibet, men of the type of the Babu whom Mr. Kipling has described in _Kim_. The whole business was kept strictly secret. The agents were known only by the letters of the alphabet, and when they crossed the Tibetan borders they were aware that they had passed beyond the protection of the British Raj. More than one reached Lhasa by fantastic routes, with the result that the Indian Government had accurate information about the city filed in its archives, while the world at large knew the place only from the story of Huc and Gabet, and from the drawing of the Potala made by Grueber in the seventeenth century. Of the later European travellers none reached the capital. Mr. Littledale in 1895 was not stopped by the Tibetan authorities till he was within fifty miles of the city, and Sven Hedin in 1901 got within fourteen days of Lhasa from the north. But meantime events were happening which were to impel the Government of India to interfere more actively in Tibetan policy than by merely sending native agents to collect news. The traditional policy was to preserve Tibet as a sanctuary, but a sanctuary is only a sanctuary if all the neighbours combine to hold it inviolate.