National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

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Lac Giamai on Ides' map is therefore placed a long way west of Barantola
and the residency of Dalai Lama, as is indeed the case with Manasarovar.

Next year, 1705, a new change of the scene takes place. Delisle, (Pl. XL),
retains the lake and calls it Lac de Chaamay, but removes it so far eastwards as
possible, obviously with the calculation that it should not interfere too much with the
comparatively settled physical geography of Hindustan and Tibet. The lake is situ-
ated straight south of Lhasa, which is also too far to the east. Delisle has dropped
three of the four rivers, Irrawaddi, Salwen and Menam, which on Gastaldi's map
issued from the lake, though the great French cartographer has not yet dared to
leave the Irrawaddi quite without contact with Chiamay: a tributary to the river of
Ava, our old acquaintance Caipoumo,¹ still takes its origin from the lake. Otherwise he
has only one river that gets every drop of its water from Lac de Chaamay, namely
Rivière de Laquia, the river from the terra incognita of Lakhimpur. If we compare
this modern representation of the lower Brahmaputra with Gastaldi's Caor river of
1561, every doubt disappears regarding the identification of the last-mentioned river.

Delisle does not accept Ides' Giamai lake, but he has another nameless lake
which he calls the source of the Ganges, and in his opinion Ides' Giamai must have
been the same as Andrade's ›tanque‹. So far he agrees with Ides. Andrade's
›tanque‹ was, as shown above, not the Manasarovar. But Delisle's nameless lake
and Ides' Giamai are both in reality, though ignored by the draughtsmen themselves,
the Manasarovar, and Lac de Chaamay, from which the Brahmaputra takes its source,
is also the Manasarovar. The nameless lake and Lac de Chaamay are therefore in
reality one and the same, or, in other words, the Manasarovar has given rise to two
false lakes on the map.

But Delisle got time to change his opinion thoroughly. On his map of 1723,
(Pl. XLII), the Chiamay has disappeared without leaving any sign behind. Here,
only ten years before d'Anville's map was published, we have a map without
the slightest trace of the Manasarovar. For there is no Chiamay, no Beruan, no
Siba, and no nameless lake. Only the Coconor is left, which at one time played
the part of the Manasarovar.

Herewith we have reached the last days of Lago de Chiamay. It took of
course some years to get it definitely extinguished from European maps, but those
who still protected the lake were ignorant fabricators of maps and books. Examples
of such maps are Pl. XLIII and XLIV, where it appears under the names of
Cara Nor and Lac Möhill,² and Pl. XLVII, which in 1727 was published by