国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

direction.¹ Under the heading: ›Delle Barche di pelle‹ Desideri gives a very clever
general description of the river. He is a practical man, so that the way in which
the river is crossed interests him more than the river itself. And still he has much
sounder views than even Klaproth more than a hundred years later. Desideri says: ›It
is necessary to know that, as the whole kingdom of Thibet is mountainous, the water
that comes down from the mountains is forming various rivers, but particularly forms
a principal river, which, from the western regions, is running towards the east and
is flowing through the whole of the third Tibet, in the middle of it; and after having
crossed the province of Kong-bò, which is further east, it penetrates through the
countries of the Lhobàs, and from there descends to Rangmati, a province of Mogol;
from there it goes to Ganges, in which this principal river of Thibet finally comes
to an end. Although the Thibetans have, in some places, big ferryboats of wood
for crossing this river, still they use as a rule hide-boats. Such boats are not of
an acute form, but of the same breadth all over, and in the bottom they are flat,
in which way they do not sink into the water, but keep fleeting on the water, and
thus are very easy to turn round. Ordinarily they are composed of 3 or 4 yak-
hides, sewed together, and which remain stretched and convex in the bottom, by
help of some bowed laths.‹² In the same detailed and correct way he describes the
chain bridges over the river.
On his journey from Nepal to Lhasa Father BELIGATTI came to Tingri.³
There he mentions ›a river flowing from west to east‹, which is of course the Tingri-
chu, a tributary to the Arun. He followed the river several days and observed how it
grew bigger. Finally he crossed it on a bridge. He calls it Bontsutsambo, which
MAGNAGHI identifies as the Phungtu of Stieler and the Poùmtsouk-Zzango-tsiou of
Klaproth. The same river is called Ponciu on van de Putte's sketch-map. Later on,
beyond Gyangtse, he mentions ›the river which goes to Kiansè‹, which is Nyang-chu.
Then Beligatti says: ›The morning of the 3d (January 1741) we descended still a
little, and entered the valley through which passes the river Tzanciu which we had
seen from the height of the mountain of Kambalà; we travelled on the bank of this
river for a distance of 3 kos, sometimes rising, sometimes descending between great
blocks, and finally arrived at the place of the boat, on which one has to cross the
river to the other bank.‹⁴ Then follow some curious statements: ›The river Tzianciù
descends precipitously from the height of a broad ravine in the mountains N.E. of
Lhasa; the head of the river is about a kos further north from the city, and, following
the foot of the mountains, the river suddenly becomes great and rapid and it runs
a long way south, at the foot of the mountains.‹ He describes the canals from the