At Gyantse the Chinese Mandarin and General, in whose train Manning had come, appointed him a little lodge in the courtyard of the principal house, and whatever he required was soon supplied by the Chinese soldiers and others who wished medical treatment from him. “One brought rice, one brought meat, another brought a table, another brought a little paste and paper and mended a hole in the window, another brought a present of a pen and candles.” Every Chinaman in the town came to see him. The General was “vastly civil and polite,” and invited him to dinner. But though he was “very much of a gentleman,” Manning concluded that he was “really no better than an old woman.” The dinner was tolerably good, and the wine excellent, but the cooking was indifferent.
On the other hand, the Mandarin was impressed by Manning’s beard. He had known men with better moustaches than Manning’s, for he had, “for convenience of eating, song, and drink,” cut his short in India, and it had not yet grown again. But the beard never failed to excite the General’s admiration, and he declared he had never seen one nearly so handsome. The General, likewise, approved of his “countenance and manner.” He pretended to skill in physiognomy and fortune-telling, and foretold very great things of Manning.
Manning also visited the Tibet Mandarin, who lived “in a sort of castle on the top of a hill,” the Jong, which General Macdonald attacked and captured in 1904, and they discussed Calcutta and Tibet together for half an hour, but what they said Manning does not record. The Tibetan intimated that he would return the visit the next day, and he sent “some rice and a useful piece of cloth, but did not come himself.”
With his medical practice Manning had a greater success. To one Chinaman and his wife, who were suffering from “an intermittent fever,” he gave “opium, Fowler’s solution of arsenic, and afterwards left them a few pages of bark. The mother-in-law, also, who had the complaint of old age, he cheered up with a little comforting physic.”
The General often came to see him, “for, like many other Generals, he had nothing to do, and was glad of a morning lounge.” He managed, however, to foist a Chinese servant on to Manning as cook. This man’s cooking was bad, but “in drying and folding up linen he saved him infinite trouble,” for, says Manning, “I never could to this day fold up a shirt or other vestment. A handkerchief or a sheet I can manage, but nothing further.”