During the summer of 1939, Archibald Trojan Steele, an American foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News living in China, traveled to the Kumbum Monastery to observe the child from Amdo, who was being examined for signs that could prove his claim to Tibet as the fourteenth Dalai Lama, at Kumbum Monastery in Northern Tibet. Arch was granted a passport to Lhasa in 1944 to visit the now-enthroned fourteenth Dalai Lama, who was nine years old at the time.
During his travels to Lhasa in 1939 and 1944, Steele took these photographs; they were later donated to the Center for Asian Studies at Arizona State University.
