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
SIR HENRY YULE'S OPINION. o 3
Roshån, but positions were assigned to them which, when protracted, were wrong not by individual errors, but by some great error affecting a whole tract; and this error appeared to be that a sheet of the original nzaft had been turned through an angle of go°, so that east became north, north became west, and so on.»
When KLAPROTH compiled his own map of Central Asia, and had the Chinese map before him, he did not use the parts of Pamir and Badakhshan, but left here a blank upon his published map. YULE shows the whole procedure on three small maps, where the part which has been deranged in azimuth is shaded. The false geography, placing Bolor north of Badakhshan, etc., was adopted by KIEPERT (1864), by VENIUKOFF, and in the apocryphal Travels in the Russian Archives.
On account of this careful examination he hopes that Bolor is finally disposed of. »We not only know that there is no such place where it was located, but we can also now account for the error.» I He hopes to see it dismissed altogether, and concludes: »Should there anywhere survive a lingering inclination to accept the documents of the Russian War-office as founded on genuine narratives, because of their agreement with the geography of the Jesuit Fathers, let us observe that, as we now see the latter to have been founded on downright accidental error, it follows that the former, which corroborate that error, are downright forgeries.»2
Sir Henry Yule, at another place 3 refers to the translations of the Messrs lM TICHELL, called The Russians in Central Asia, where an extract of Veniukoff's records of the apocryphal exploration was to be found.
Regarding these documents Yule says that
their fictitious character had been essentially established by Sir Henry Rawlinson, even before the lamented Lord Strang-ford's discovery that a parallel mass of papers, embodying much of the same peculiar geography and nomenclature, existed in the London Foreign Office, purporting to be the Report of a Russian expedition sent through Central Asia to the frontiers of India, in the beginning of this century. The papers having been purchased from the celebrated Julius Henry von Klaproth in 1824, there can be little doubt, it is to be feared , that the acute and brilliant linguist and geographer was himself the author of all three sets of papers ; nor perhaps was there any contemporary capable of accomplishing a fraud of the kind so successfully.
In a note Yule says:
I am not aware if the officials of the Russian War Department have ever explained on what grounds M. Khanikoff was led to suppose that the date of the entry of these
I »Humboldt, with his great authority, has too definitely attached this name (Bolor) to an
erroneous orographical system. Yule's Marco Polo, Vol. I, p. 179, n.
2 In his note on Bolor (Marco Polo, I) YULE returns to the apocryphal MS. of Georg Ludwig von —, preserved in the Military Archives at St. Petersburg. »That work represents a town of Bolor as existing to the north of Badakhshan, with Wakhån still further to the north. This geography we now know to be entirely erroneous, but it is in full accordance with the maps and tables of the Jesuit missionaries and their pupils, who accompanied the Chinese troops to Kashgar in I758-59.»
3 The Essay in Wood's book, 1872, p. LI et seq.
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