IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Southern Tibet : vol.3 |
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Citation Information
CHAPTER XXI.
MARKHAM AND SAUNDERS.
We have now followed the development of knowledge of the Transhima1 aya through the ages and seen how extremely slowly its peripheric parts have emerged from darkness, and how, as a very natural matter of fact, its interior parts have remained a terra incognita. We are now approaching the last period of its history. Between 1875 and 1877 two well-known scholars have more particularly discussed the system, and in this chapter with the assistance of some quotations, I will show their views.
At that time Sir CLEMENTS MARKHAM was, no doubt, the great authority on the geography of Tibet. His publication of the early British journeys to Shigatse and Lhasa gave him an occasion to enter thoroughly into the matter. And since then he has always followed Tibetan exploration most attentively. The journey of the native explorer to Tengri-nor brought some of the great problems again into the foreground.
Still in 1875 Markham says that Great Tibet is one of the least known and
most important regions which remain to be explored. It is, he says, to Mont-
gomerie we owe all our recent knowledge. Our general knowledge of the country is still derived from the work of du Halde and from the old maps of d'Anville. Markham also mentions Hodgson amongst the authorities, and in giving the boundaries of Utsang he says: . . . »and on the north (it is bounded) by another lofty range called by Hodgson the Nyenchhen-thånglå chain, which separates the country of villages and cultivation from the nomadic hordes on the still loftier plateau of lacustrine drainage between that chain and the Kuen-lun.» And further: »The Tsampu, or Brahmaputra, traverses the whole region from west to east, and receives tributaries from the Nyenchhen-thånglå Range on the north, and the northern slopes of the Himalayan outer and inner chains on the south.» It is surprising to see how Hodgson, so late as in 1909, was still regarded as an original authority upon the Nien-chen-tang-la although all the knowledge existing about that range originally came from Klaproth.
I )Travels in Great Tibet and Trade between Tibet and Bengal.» Journal Royal Geogr. Society, Vol. 45, 1875, p. 299 et seq.
23-141741 III.
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