SEATON, England -- A British tourist in a border town in Tibet had a run-in with a Chinese soldier who thought the picture of the American television character Sergeant Bilko on her T-shirt was a likeness of the Dalai Lama.

Kris Tait, 25, said she was walking in the Tibetan border town of Gyangtse during her vacation recently when a Chinese soldier mistook the face of Bilko, the 1950s TV character played by the late Phil Silvers, for the deposed Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama.


She said the soldier levelled his gun at her and tried to rip off the T-shirt. Pictures of the exiled Tibetan are banned from the country.

Tait, so ardent a Bilko fan she named her cat after him, was ordered to fold her arms across her chest to cover the smiling bespectacled face on her shirt and was marched back to her hotel to change.

In the meantime, a crowd of smiling Tibetans had gathered and chanted 'Dalai Lama.'

Tibetans recently rioted against Chinese rule in support of their exiled leader.

'Looking back on it, I suppose he (Bilko) does look a bit like the Dalai Lama,' Tait said at her home, some 140 miles southwest of London. 'I really thought the soldier was going to hurt me or lock me up. It was terrifying.'