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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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| 0104 |
Southern Tibet : vol.1 |
Citation Information
OCR Text
It runs as if the Latin version were partly translated from the Arabian, which
is 700 years older.
Grueber and Dorville came from the north, and to them Kuti, now called
Nilam-dsong and situated on the Tibetan side of the frontier, was »la première Ville
du Royaume de Necbal« (Kircher).
To the Chinese, Nepal, under the name of Ne-po-lo, had been known hun-
dreds of years before Alberuni's time. Hiuen-tsang, the famous and admirable pil-
grim, whose journeys fall within 629 and 644, seems to be the first Chinese traveller
who gathered information about Nepal, a country which he did not visit, and which
had not been mentioned by the great Fa-hian who travelled to the western countries
200 years earlier.¹
In a book which ought to be called I-tsing His Pilgrims, I-TSING himself
a pilgrim, tells us in very short and pregnant words the experiences and peregrina-
tions of the Chinese Buddhists, who, in the second half of the 7th century, travelled
to India, and of whom many, either coming from the north or from the south,
crossed Nepal on that horrible road, so graphically described by Alberuni 400
years later. Several of those Chinese pilgrims who would return via Nepal died
there, as they could not support the hard climate of the mountains. Unfortunately
there is very little geography in their descriptions, or rather in the annotations of
I-tsing. Here is an instance:² The Master of Law, Hiuen-t'ai, in 650 to 655 »prit
le chemin des T'ou-fan (Tibétains), traversa le Ni-po-louo (Népaul) et arriva dans
l'Inde du centre«, and then returned to his home the same way.³
Alberuni's account of this old road is one of the most precious pearls in
the geographical literature of the Arabs.
EDRISI was born at Ceuta about 1100 and had finished his great geography
in 1154. He never visited the east himself, but he was a very learned man and
made use of all the geographical knowledge of his time, though, as Reinaud sup-
poses, he has not known the account of Suleiman and the remarks of Abu Said;
from other works he has borrowed whole pages, and he consulted narratives which
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