National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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| 0198 |
Southern Tibet : vol.1 |
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Marco Polo. What he tells us of corals,¹ woollens,² enchanters and astrologers,³
mastiff dogs,⁴ and musk,⁵ agrees perfectly with what is well known of Tibet proper
in our time, all the way to the frontier of Ladak and eastwards to the boundary
of Szechuan and Yunnan. Only his opinion of the Tibetans is unjust, for so far as
my experience goes a more good-tempered and kind-hearted people can hardly be
found in the interior of Asia.⁶
Marco Polo has observed that the Tibetans use salt instead of money. All
the people of the province of Carajan are said to make a living by salt made from
brine-wells.⁷ In the southern parts of Tibet Proper, salt is indeed used as money.
In the village of Pasaguk I saw a trading-house with a large store of salt in bags.
Here a market is held from time to time, salt being the medium of exchange.⁸
The few glimpses Marco Polo gives us of what he calls Tibet are, there-
fore, so characteristic and true for what we call Tibet nowadays, that he very likely
has known the far westward extent of this country and may even have believed that
it bordered upon Kashmir.⁹ According to him Tibet was subject to the Great Kaan,
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