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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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| 0278 |
Southern Tibet : vol.1 |
Citation Information
OCR Text
On our wanderings through the centuries we have to proceed beyond the
middle of the seventeenth before we can talk of any definite change in the right
direction in the field of Central Asiatic cartography. Properly speaking it is a dis-
appointing task to search through the maps of three hundred years without finding
any reliable information about the country we are studying in this work, and still it
is a task of absorbing interest, at least for those who have seen these regions with
their own eyes, and therefore will understand how and why this *terra*, surrounded
with its girdle of *montes inaccessibles*, could remain *incognita* for such a long time.
The maps will tell us, far better than any words, how human knowledge, slowly but
surely, conquered the coasts, and, step by step, proceeded from them towards the
interior; how China, India, Turkestan and Siberia little by little assumed more rea-
sonable forms, while the nucleus of High Asia, Tibet, still remained unconquerable.
In the seventeenth century we shall see how the scientific explorers at home and in
the field will approach the borderland of Tibet without reaching the country itself.
On some maps from this period even the name of Tibet will be missing, while other
draughtsmen are very uncertain of its whereabouts. Still the journeys of Odoric and
Andrade remain forgotten and have no influence at all on the maps, with only one
exception, Kircher's map,] Pl. XI. But after the journey of Grueber and Dorville
in 1661 and 1662 the cartographers could no longer ignore the mysterious country,
which so far had been a fata morgana to them, and had, towards the eve of the
next century, to assign for it a place somewhere north of India.
The first map we are going to discuss is the »*Novissima ac exactissima totius
orbis terrarum descriptio magna*» by JODOCUS HONDIUS, Amsterdam 1611, Pl. XXV.¹
He conscientiously used the material existing at his time and as no new information
had been won from the countries north of India, he has nothing to add beyond the
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436
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454
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