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
RICHARD AND HENRY STRACHEY. 203
In a little book published in 1851, HENRY T. PRINSEP gives a general view of the then existing knowledge of Tibet.' It is only a compilation from ancient and modern travellers, especially from HUG'S book. Of some interest is his little sketch map where Eastern Turkestan is bordered in the west by the Biloot Tag Mts., to the S. W. by the Kurakurum Mts. and to the south by the Bain Karatoola (Bayen Kharat in the text). The Tibetan plateau is bordered to the west by the Gangra Mts., which start as a nearly meridional range from the Kurakurum Mts.—Bain Karatoola range, or, in reality, the Kuen-lun.
DIi.SIDERI'S route is marked a good long way north of the »Sampoo», but this is chiefly due to the ignorance of the mapmaker regarding the situation of Gartok. I have inserted a reprint of PRINSEP'S little map (Pl. XLVII) only as a curiosity, showing what liberties certain draftsmen could allow themselves at a time when RITTER'S and KI.APROTH'S excellent maps were 18 and 15 years old, and ought to have been consulted by people writing books about Tibet.
In 1851 RICHARD STRACHEY wrote about the elevated region called Tibet that:
we are familiar with the mountains that abut upon , and indeed form its southern edge, as the Himalaya; while there seems every reason to suppose that the chain that appears upon our maps as the Kouenlun in like manner forms its termination to the north.
And he adds that:
it appears to be with few exceptions broken up into a mass of mountain, the average elevation of whose surface is very great, often exceeding in altitude 15,000 feet .... It is the opinion of my brother Captain Henry Strachey .... that neither the Kouenlun, nor the Himalaya, as marked upon our maps, have any definite special existence as mountain-chains apart from the general elevated mass of Tibet. That rugged country thus seems to form the summit of a great protuberance, above the general level of the earth's surface, of which these two chains form the north and south faces. All my own observations lead me to concur entirely in this opinion. 2
Thereby it should be noticed that Richard Strachey means our real Karakorum when he talks of Kwen-lun, a fact that makes his opinion wrong so far as the northern front is concerned.
HENRY STRACHEY relates that the region lying behind the Indian Himalaya is a belt of high mountainous table land, »narrow compared with its length, and to the best of our imperfect knowledge subsiding on its N. E. border, into the plains and sandy deserts of Turkistan and Khamsok. This part of Tibet is called Bod, i. e. Tibet proper, or Central Tibet, at its E. end and Nari at its N. W., the former division being the shorter of the two, but probably the broader, and certainly the more populous and civilized.»3
I Tibet, Tartary and Mongolia; their Social and Political condition, and the religion of Boodh, as there existing. London 1851.
2 Journal Royal Geographical Society. Vol. 21, 1851, p. 58.
3 Physical Geography of Western Tibet. journal Royal Geographical Society. Vol. 23, 1853, P• 3.
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