Diario La Nación
- Tibet, the land of monasteries
- Three days left to take part in the Fox contest
- Two years of daily swindles
This partial reading of the 12 November 1926 issue of La Nación of Santiago covers three items. A feature on Tibet opened with the claim that a country estimated at three million people had no fewer than half a million priests and was dotted with monasteries. A badly damaged notice told readers that only three days remained to enter a Fox film contest and said Fox would pay certain costs for the winners. A report from Moscow described a trial over an unusual run of frauds, starting with a Cossack railway guard who caught three men climbing a telegraph pole.
This reading covers three short passages transcribed from the page images, because the supplied OCR is heavily garbled. The Tibet passage breaks off mid-word at a column end. The Fox contest notice is largely illegible, and its gaps are marked [?]. The Moscow fraud passage gives only the opening of the story and does not reach the verdict. The curled left page edge cuts off line beginnings in some columns. The sources consulted do not establish whether any Chilean winner of the Fox contest went to Hollywood.
Translation
Tibet, the land of monasteries
Tibet, with a population that has been estimated at three million inhabitants, has no fewer than half a million priests. This is not surprising, since Tibetan territory is strewn, so to speak, with monaste-
Three days left to take part in the Fox contest
[?] difficult to explain the [?] that the [?] bring together. It is the [?] future, [?] triumph in the [?]. Indeed, [?] of the contest, Fox [?] undertakes, [?] place, to pay for the [?] of the winners [?]. In
Two years of daily swindles
In Moscow a trial has just been held, brought as a result of a series of frauds truly unique of their kind. Last year a Cossack, on watch along a railway line, one day caught three individuals busy climbing a telegraph pole.
Context
How Soviet law treated fraud against the state in the mid-1920s
The Moscow report concerns a trial over a long series of frauds, and its readable lines begin with a Cossack guarding a railway line who caught three men on a telegraph pole, a detail suggesting that the scheme involved the state telegraph lines. The legal setting was still new. The Soviet state had begun to treat the protection of socialist property against private gain as a distinct problem in the mid-1920s, and the RSFSR Criminal Code of 1926 contained separate articles on property, official and economic crimes. Even at that stage, offences against state property were punished more harshly than offences against personal property, so a fraud that drained a state service counted as a graver matter than cheating an individual. Soviet criminal law also kept the death penalty, describing it as an exceptional measure to be used until its complete abolition, and decrees of 1922 and 1923 gave the police the right to carry out summary executions. The systematic use of execution for theft of state property came only later: in 1932, at Stalin's suggestion, the penalties for stealing socialist property were tightened so that especially serious cases could be punished by death.
What a great Tibetan monastery was like, and how the West reached one
The article's picture of a Tibet strewn with monasteries, and its estimate of half a million priests among three million people, is the paper's own claim. A single large house gives a sense of scale: the Palcho (Pelkor Chode) monastery at Gyantse, whose main temple was built in 1418–1428, held 1,520 monks before the 1959 uprising. Gyantse was also a place where British soldiers came into direct contact with a great Tibetan monastery. The British expedition led by Colonel Francis Younghusband reached the town on 11 April 1904, and after the occupation several British officers visited the monastery and seized statues and scrolls, some of which went to the United Kingdom. Twenty-two years later, a Santiago daily could present Tibet's monastic world to Chilean readers as a curiosity of distant lands.
Where the Western image of Tibetan monastic ritual came from
One way monastic Tibet reached audiences outside Asia in the 1920s was through images of its masked ritual. The cham is a masked and costumed dance tied to some schools of Tibetan Buddhism and to Buddhist festivals, performed by monks with their own music and meant as instruction and offering. In the early twentieth century Westerners called it the "devil dance", a label taken from how they perceived the dancers' costumes rather than from the dance's meaning. The 1922 Mount Everest expedition filmed about fifteen monks performing such a dance at Rongbuk monastery before a large crowd, and the footage appeared in the silent film Climbing Mt. Everest. The Tibet feature in La Nación appeared four years after that film was shot, when such images of monastic ritual were reaching audiences abroad.
What kind of newspaper La Nación was when it ran a Hollywood contest
La Nación was founded on 14 January 1917 by a group of Liberal parliamentarians led by Eliodoro Yáñez, and by the mid-1920s it stood among the papers that favoured news over open party propaganda. Its foreign-news and sports sections were especially popular with readers, which helps explain a page mixing a Tibetan travel feature, a Moscow court story and a promotion tied to an American film studio. Since 1922 the company had also owned the evening paper Los Tiempos, so a contest such as the Fox competition could be run through both titles. The notice on this page says that Fox undertook to pay certain costs for the winners; that promise is the paper's claim. The paper's independent phase was nearly over: in 1927 La Nación was expropriated by Carlos Ibáñez del Campo's dictatorship and became the official organ of the Chilean state.
Original
Tibet, la tierra de los monasterios
El Tibet, con una población que ha sido estimada en tres millones de habitantes, cuenta con no menos de medio millón de sacerdotes. No es esto de extrañar, ya que el territorio tibetano está sembrado, por decirlo así, de monaste -
Quedan tres días para tomar parte en el concurso Fox
[?] difícil explicarse el [?] que reunen los [?]. Es el [?] porvenir, [?] triunfen en las [?]. En efecto, [?] del concurso, la Fox [?] se compromete, [?] lugar, a costêar los [?] de los triunfadores [?]. En
Dos años de estafas diarias
En Moscú acaba de verse un proceso instruído a consecuencia de una serie de estafas verdaderamente únicas en su género. El año último un cosaco, de vigilancia a lo largo de una vía férrea, sorprendió un día a tres individuos ocupados en escalar un poste telegráfico.
Source: Source: Internet Archive