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| 0126 |
Southern Tibet : vol.3 |
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fast gar nichts bekannt ist, und es zu einer wahren Terra incognita gehört, so wird gewöhnlich
wenn vom Tübet im Allgemeinen die Rede ist, nur diese »südliche Zone gemeint.» ¹
Here Ritter points out the parallelism or the divergence towards the east.
He recognizes the abundance of morphological detail and knows that the space be-
tween the principal ranges is filled up by secondary ranges. He regards the inte-
rior of Tibet as divided into two plateau-lands, Katchi or Khor Katchi in the north
and Tibet Proper in the south, and the line of division is marked by a central
gathering of mountain ranges, the western part of which is the Gangdisri, whereas
the eastern part is the Dzang-mountains. The northern half he populates with Hor
or Khor tribes of Mongolian origin, the southern is »the third Tibet» of the natives.
This view should later on be adopted by one or two geographers, who perhaps, in
a quite independent way, arrived at the same conclusion as Ritter; at any rate they
do not quote him as their authority. Ritter, however, calls the northern region a
»true terra incognita», and therefore he only believed it was inhabited by Mongol
tribes. In reality the Gangdisri-Dzang or Transhimalayan system cannot be a
boundary between nomads and sedentary, and still less between Mongols and
Tibetans. For there are some temples and villages north of the system and many
nomads south of it. Its great importance consists in its being a water-parting be-
tween the lakes of the plateau-land and the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra.
Thus we find that Ritter, although he made very little or no use of d'Anville,
and only built up his geographical conclusions on Klaproth's translations, was perfectly
persuaded of the existence of a long continuous range north of the Tsangpo. He
was also a sufficiently sharp and perspicacious geographer to understand that the
considerable tributaries of the Tsangpo, of which the Chinese texts spoke, could
hardly be fed and rise in anything except high mountains. And as the Chinese
texts directly described the Kailas, the Dzang range and the Nien-chen-tang-la,
Ritter thought that an uninterrupted range must obviously exist north of the Tsangpo
valley. His whole conception is Chinese, his sources we have quoted above; he
only digested and brought order into the dry, matter-of-fact description of the Chi-
nese and formed their material into a modern, scientific system of geographical
morphology.
According to the Wei-Tsang-t'u-chih he places Kailas in the N.E. of the prov-
ince of Ngari, and connects the four animal mountains with it, those of the Horse,
Elephant, Lion and Peacock, and says that they stretch a distance of 48 geogr.
miles or 800 li, — »bis zu dem Hochgebirge von Nga-ri — das ist also die sonst
gänzlich unbekannte Nordkette.»² This »Northern range» is the Gangdisri-Dzang-
Nien-chen-tang-la or Transhimalaya, which Ritter, in 1834, regarded as »wholly
unknown». As Ritter absorbed every ounce of geographical knowledge of his time,
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349
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362
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375
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393
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410
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443
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455
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473
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487
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550
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563
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575
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587
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599
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