IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
| |||||||||
|
| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Southern Tibet : vol.7 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Citation Information
THE MOUNTAIN RANGES OF TIBET.
~
.f~
It
~
365
these basins receive their poor affluents from the mountains and ranges that bound these
regions, or in the north from Kwen-lun, in the south from Gang-dis-ri, a. e. the prolongation of the Kara-korum according to the reliable statement of the Schlagintweits.
So far as it was possible for Bogdanovitch to get a glance into that country from the north, and NAIN SING from the south, snowy mountains did not rise from its surface. This plateau-land of such enormous absolute height (the average altitude both in its northern and its southern parts, along the lakes, he estimates at 14,000 feet), occupying nearly 4° in breadth and I I° in length, has no outlet and does not possess any snow mountains. In this stony »hammada of cold Tibet one may have to dig out of the earth every drop of sweet water one needs», as Bogdanovitch says. In this part of Tibet the climate is extremely hard, it is a country avoided by men, a land where the hardy yak and Orongo-antelope do not find any grazing-grounds. »Such is, according to all that is known the mountainland of Katchi, the land of the Hor-people according to Chinese geographers.»
He again returns to the difficulty of separating those parts of the Kwen-lun that border upon the Pamir, Mustagh and Kara-korum. The different mountain systems are joined in the most complicated way and cannot be detached from one another. He approaches the question of where the western end of the Kwen-lun is to be put. The western parts of that system and of Kara-korum represent two curves which join the Mus-tagh-ata Range and eastward diverge towards the interior of Tibet. Of the further fate of the Kara-korum he has nothing to say. But in the regions of Tsaidam and Koko-nor the Kwen-lun seems to form another system of curves, stretching in the same south-east--north-west direction as in the far west, and eastward continue far into the interior of China. Between these two systems of curves the central Kwen-lun, separating Kashgaria from Tibet, represents a joining link. Genetically it is of quite another kind and age from the western and eastern wings of the system, for it belongs to the old upheaval of North-western Tibet, destroyed by the »Tibetan transgression».
According to Bogdanovitch the existence of the Samtin-kansir or Nien-chentang-la Range, which stretches to the N. E., makes it possible that one has to compare its geological and orographical situation with the relation between the Tibetan plateau-land, the »Russian range» and Tokus-davan. Bogdanovitch, therefore, puts the question thus: is the old E. N. E. stretching bounded only to the borderland of Tibet, or is it spread all over Tibet down to Himalaya? Under such conditions Central Kwen-lun should represent a rest of the relief of the old mass with E. N. E. stretching structure lines, which should, perhaps, prove that it stood in some relation to RICH'I'HOFEN'S »Sinisches System». In the first case we would have to regard Central Kwen-lun only as a local bend in the monoclinal rupture which in palaozoic time broke up the continent of Asia from E. S. E. to W. N. W., from the Malay Peninsula
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright (C) 2003-2019 National Institute of Informatics and The Toyo Bunko. All Rights Reserved.