国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

LAGO DE CHIAMAY BEGINS TO DISAPPEAR.

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243

Lac Giamai on Ides' map is therefore placed a long way west of Barantola and the residency of Dalai Lama, as is indeed the case with Manasarovar.

Next year, 1705, a new change of the scene takes place. Delisle, (Pl. XL), retains the lake and calls it Lac de Chaamay, but removes it so far eastwards as possible, obviously with the calculation that it should not interfere too much with the comparatively settled physical geography of Hindustan and Tibet. The lake is situated straight south of Lhasa, which is also too far to the east. Delisle has dropped three of the four rivers, Irrawaddi, Salwen and Menam, which on Gastaldi's map issued from the lake, though the great French cartographer has not yet dared to leave the Irrawaddi quite without contact with Chiamay : a tributary to the river of Ava, our old acquaintance Caipoumo, I still takes its origin from the lake. Otherwise he has only one river that gets every drop of its water from Lac de Chaamay, namely Rivière de Laquia, the river from the terra incognita of Lakhimpur. If we compare this modern representation of the lower Brahmaputra with Gastaldi's Caor river of 1561, every doubt disappears regarding the identification of the last-mentioned river.

Delisle does not accept Ides' Giamai lake, but he has another nameless lake which he calls the source of the Ganges, and in his opinion Ides' Giamai must have been the same as Andrade's »tangue». So far he agrees with Ides. Andrade's )tanque) was, as shown above, not the Manasarovar. But Delisle's nameless lake and Ides' Giamai are both in reality, though ignored by the draughtsmen themselves, the Manasarovar, and Lac de Chaamay, from which the Brahmaputra takes its source, is also the Manasarovar. The nameless lake and Lac de Chaamay are therefore in reality one and the same, or, in other words, the Manasarovar has given rise to two false lakes on the map.

But Delisle got time to change his opinion thoroughly. On his map of 17 2 3, (Pl. XLII), the Chiamay has disappeared without leaving any sign behind. Here, only ten years before d'Anville's map was published, we have a map without the slightest trace of the Manasarovar. For there is no Chiamay, no Beruan, no Siba, and no nameless lake. Only the Coconor is left, which at one time played the part of the Manasarovar.

Herewith we have reached the last days of Lago de Chiamay. It took of course some years to get it definitely extinguished from European maps, but those who still protected the lake were ignorant fabricators of maps and books. Examples of such maps are Pl. XLIII and XLIV, where it appears under the names of Cara Nor and Lac Möhill, 2 and Pl. XLVII, which in 17 2 7 was published by

I Delisle seems to identify Caipoumo with the Chindwin river.

2 In Histoire Généalogique des Tartars, it is said,   122: »Le Lac Möhill dont nostre Auteur
parle en cette occasion est le mesme que nos Geographes modernes appellent le Lac Giammaï ou Koko-Nor, & que les Callmoucks du Tangut appellent encore à l'heure qu'il est Cara Nor: L'Histoire Chinoise est conforme à cet egard à ce que nostre Auteur avance en cet endroit, d'autant qu'elle ne parle jamais de ce Pays, que comme d'un Estat qui a esté pendant plusieurs Siècles sujet à l'Empire de la Chine.»