IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Southern Tibet : vol.7 |
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Citation Information
CHAPTER X.
DEGUIGNES AND GEORGI.
As an example of the knowledge of Asiatic orography in the middle of the I 8th century, I may quote here some extracts from DEGUIGNES, which in several respects are remarkable. In his description, as, for instance, on the map of STRAHLENBERG, only the eastern parts of Tibet exist, not the western. He says of it:' Ce royaume est ce que nous appellons précisément le Tibet, ou le Boutan, que l'on distingue en grand & petit Tibet. C'est un pays plein de montagnes, où peu de voyageurs ont pénétré. Les Chinois le nomment Tou-fan ou Si-tçang .... Lassa, autrement nommée Barantola, est la capitale de ce grand pays. But on the other hand, he includes under the expression »Tibetan nations» all those peoples who are living west of the provinces of Shen-si and Sze-chuan all the way to the sources of the Indus.
The great orographical features of High Asia he expresses in the following words, and with a perspicacity and intelligence which hardly had occurred before his time: Au nord des sources du Ganges, il s'élève une chaine de montagnes qui va gagner Khoten, Yerken et Kaschgar, courant au nord & à l'ouest. A Kaschghar, elle tourne vers le nord-est & va jusqu'à la riviere d'Ili qu'elle suit en remontant au nord. C'est là ce que Ptolémée appelle le mont Imaüs, par lequel il divise la Scythie en deux parties.2
With the knowledge existing at the middle of the i 8th century, an erudite
scholar who tried to combine recent information with the geography of PTOLEMY, could hardly arrive at any other conclusion. As so many cartographers of this period and before this time, DEGUIGNES believes that only one single mountain range exists between India and Little Bokharia. This range, in which the sources of the Ganges are situated, turns to the north and west, and has Khotan, Yarkand and Kashgar at its northern base. From Kashgar it turns to the N. E. and north and is identified as the meridional Imaus of Ptolemy.
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I Histoire générale des Huns. Paris 1756. Tome I, partie I, p. 163. 2 Op. cit., p. II.
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