tion of government and blood with the central and western peoples, thus putting into the veins of the modern Tibetan strains which run from widely separated sources, and producing a type marked by special characteristics. It cannot be supposed, however, that the immigration from the south was numerous or that it came from the splendid Hindu civilisation which lay south and west of Nepal, and which was highly developed long before even the legendary beginning of the southern dynasties (circa 300 B.C.). For even these prejudiced compilers of the pro-Indian stories declare that knowledge of arithmetic was imported from China about the year 600 A.D., and, though the art of writing is said to have come from India, it is evident that it came but as a part of the Buddhistic mission work and was not known until the year 632 A.D. The Hindu civilisation would have furnished both these accomplishments from the beginning of any colonisation traceable to such a source.
Nothing could better illustrate the seclusion of this people than this extraordinarily late date for the introduction of the three R's. It suggests that the Fanni movement was, indeed, that of a people on the rim of Chinese civilisation and that the mythical Indian kings of the lamas' chronicles were but rude mountain chiefs from Bhutan or Nepal. Turkestan, desert- and mountain-bound as it is, had its letters eight hundred years earlier than this secluded land -- a Bastile built by demons, where a nation might be forgotten.'
1 In accepting the early part of the seventh century as the date of writing's birth in Tibet, we must compromise with a Chinese record,
IIIFカラー高解像度
