Page:EB1911 - Volume 26.djvu/957

 word in colloquial pronunciation is aspirated into Bhöd or Bhöt, and in the modern Lhasa dialect is curtailed into Bhö. Hence the country is known to Indians as Bhōt, and the inhabitants as Bhōt-ias. This territory came to be known to Europeans as “Tibet” evidently because the great plateau with its uplands bordering the frontiers of China, Mongolia and Kashmir, through which travellers communicated with this country, is called by the natives Tö-bhöt (written slod-bod) or “High Bod,” or “Tibet,” which designation in the loose orthography of travellers assumed a variety of forms. Thus in Chinese annals are found T'u-bat (5th century, ), Tu-po-te, Tie-bu-te, T'u-bo-te (10th and 11th centuries) and at the present day T'u-fan (fan, as Bushell shows, being the same Chinese character which had formerly the sound of po); in Mongolian, Tübet, Toböt; in Arabic, Tubbet; Istakhri (c. 590), Tobbat; Rabbi Benjamin (1165), Thibet; I. de Plano Carpini (1247), Thabet; Rubruquis (1253), Marco Polo (1298), Tebet; Ibn Batuta (1340), Thabat; Ibn Haukal (976), Al Biruni (1020), Odoric of Pordenone (c. 1328), Orazio della Penna (1730), Tibet, which is the form now generally adopted. The inhabitants of Tibet call themselves Bod-pa (pronounced usually Bhö-pa), or “people of Bod.” Other Tibetan epithets for the country sometimes used by flowery native writers are “The Icy Land” (Gangs-c'an) and the “Country of the Red Faces” (Gdong-mar-gyi yul). The Chinese name for central Tibet is Wei-Ts'ang, which is a transcription of the Tibetan designation of the two: provinces Ü and Tsang (spelt dbus-gtsang) that constitute central Tibet. Among the Mongols, Tibetans are called Tangutu and the country Barontala or the “right side,” in contradistinction to Dzöntala or “left side,” which was their own name for Mongolia itself.

Geography.—Physically Tibet may be divided into two parts, the lake region in the west and north-west, and the river region, which slpreads out on three sides of the former on the east, south, and west. The lake region extends from the Pangong t'so (t'so = lake) in Ladak, near the source of the Indus, to the sources of the Salween, the Mekong and the Yangtse. This region is called the Chang-t'ang (Byang tang) or “Northern Plateau” by the people of Tibet. It is some 700 m. broad, and covers an area about equal to that of France. From its great distance from the ocean it is extremely arid, and possesses no river outlet. The mountain ranges are spread out, rounded, disconnected, separated by flat valleys relatively of little depth. The country is dotted over with large and small lakes, generally salt or alkaline, and intersected by streams, and the soil is boggy and covered with tussocks of grass, thus resembling the Siberian tundra and the Pamirs. Its average altitude is over 16,000 ft., the northern portion of it being the highest. Salt and fresh-water lakes are intermingled. The lakes are generally without outlet, or have only a small effluent. The deposits consist of soda, potash, borax and common salt. This last is frequently found piled high and split into blocks apparently of artificial formation, but probably the result of the action of wind and intense cold. The loftiest lake so far as observed is Hospa t’so, near the Lingshi plain on the Kashmir frontier; its altitude is given as 17,930 ft. The lake region is noted for a vast number of hot springs, which are widely distributed between the Himalayas and 34° N., but are most numerous to the west of Tengri Nor (north-west of Lhasa). So intense is the cold in Tibet that these springs are sometimes represented by columns of ice, the nearly boiling water having frozen in the act of ejection. The southern portion, from Lake Pangong to Tengri Nor, is inhabited by pastoral tribes of Tibetans, and possesses a few hamlets, such as Ombo, Rudok and Senja jong. The river region comprises the upper courses of the Brahmaputra (Yaru Tsangpo), the Salween (? Gyama nyul chu), the Yangtsze (Dre chu), the Mekong (Nya-lung chu), and the Yellow River (Ma chu). Amidst the mountains there are many narrow valleys, partially cultivated from an altitude of 12,000 ft. downwards, with here and there fine forests covering the mountain sides. Villages of high stone built houses are to be found wherever the valley bottoms open out enough to afford a little space for agriculture. The northern portion of Tibet is an arid and wind-swept desert; but in the southern portion the valleys of Lhasa, Shigatse, Gyantse and the Brahmaputra are covered with good soil and groves of trees, well irrigated, and richly cultivated.

The valley of the (q.v.), or Yaru Tsang-po or simply Tsang-po—the river has also various local names—is the great arterial valley of southern Tibet. On the south it is bounded by the Himalayas, on the north by a mountain-system still more vast. This mountain-system was only vaguely known, in fact its existence throughout its length was only suspected, until Sven Hedin, during his journeys in 1906–1908, crossed it at several points. He found the system to form the chief physio graphical feature of southern Tibet, and stated it to be “on the whole the most massive range on the crust of the earth, its average height above the sea level being greater than that of the Himalayas. Its peaks are 4000 to 5000 feet lower than Mount Everest, but its passes average 3000 feet higher than the Himalayan passes.” Its extreme breadth is about 120 m. in the central part, its northern limit being marked by the chain of lakes running N.W. and S.E. between 30° and 33° N., beyond which the mountains of central Tibet are much lower. The system at no point narrows to a single range; generally there are three or four across its breadth. As a whole the system forms the watershed between rivers flowing to the Indian Ocean-the Indus and its tributaries, Brahmaputra and its tributaries, and Salween and the streams flowing into the untrained salt lakes to the north. The principal ranges in the system are the Nien-chen-tang-la, called Kanchung-gangri in the west, the Targo-Gangri-Lapchung range, the very lofty Hlunpo-Gangri range, the Dingla range, &c. The whole system had been marked by inference on some maps before Hedin's discoveries, and named Gangri; Hedin proposed for it the name of Trans-Himalaya.

Geology and Mineral Wealth.—Little is known of the geological structure of the central regions of Tibet. The observations of Strachey, Godwin-Austen and of Griesbach and other members of the Geological Survey of India only extend to the southern edge or rim of the great plateau, where vast alluvial deposits in horizontal strata have been furrowed into deep ravines, while Russian explorers have but superficially examined the mountain regions of the north and north-east, and the British mission to Lhasa in 1904 afforded observations merely along the trade-route to that city. The general structure of the trans-Himalayan chains appears to indicate that the main axis of upheaval of the whole vast mass of the Tibetan highlands is to be found on two approximately parallel lines, represented the one by the Kuen-lun and the other by a line which is more or less coincident with the watershed between India and the central lake region, extending from Lake Pangong to Tengri Nor, the plateau enclosed between the two being wrinkled by minor folds, of which the relative elevation is comparatively low, averaging from 1000 to 1500 ft. The strike of these folds is usually east and west and roughly parallel to the axes of elevation of the plateau. A remarkable economic feature is the almost universal distribution of gold throughout Tibet. The gold-digging is referred to in somewhat mythical terms by Herodotus. Every river which rises in Tibet washes down sands impregnated with gold, and it has been proved that this gold is not the product of intervening strata, but must have existed primarily in the crystalline rocks of the main axes of upheaval. In western Tibet the gold mines of Jalung have been worked since 1875. They have been visited by native explorers of the Indian Survey, who reported that much gold was produced and remitted twice a year under a Chinese guard to Peking. The Tibetan diggers collected together at the mines chiefly during the Winter, when the frost assisted to bind the loose alluvial soil and render excavation easy. These mines are within 200 m. of the Ladak frontier, near the sources of the Indus, at an elevation which cannot be less than 15,000 ft. above sea-level. They are worked in crude desultory fashion and are sometimes abandoned owing to the exorbitant imposts levied on gold production by Chinese and Tibetan officials. Between the Ladak frontier and Lhasa the plateau region teems with evidences of abandoned mines. These mines are excavations in the alluvial soil, never more than from 20 to 30 ft. deep.

The researches of Prjevalsky demonstrate that gold is plentiful in northern and eastern Tibet. Here Tungus diggers were encountered who had extracted handfuls of gold in small nuggets from a stream bed at a depth which they stated to be no greater than 2 ft. Another scientific explorer, W. Mesny, has observed similar evidences of the existence of gold at comparatively shallow depths in Koko Nor region, and records that he has seen nuggets, “varying from the size of a pea to that of a hazel-nut,” in eastern Tibet. The gold was almost pure and perfectly malleable. The Gork goldfields, which are visible from Koko Nor, are reported to have yielded to China considerable quantities of gold as lately as 1888. They are now deserted. Prjevalsky, indeed, predicts of northern Tibet that it will prove a “second California” in course of time. But little gold at present finds its way across the Tibetan passes to India; and the export to China has diminished of late years.

Iron is found in eastern Tibet in the form of pyrites, and is rudely smelted locally. Salt and borax exist in abundance in the western lake regions. The exportation of borax to India is only limited by the comparatively small demand. Lapis-lazuli and mercury are among the minor mineral products of the country.

Climate.—The climate of Tibet varies so greatly over the enormous area and different altitudes of the country that no two travellers agree precisely in their records. Tibet is affected by the s0uth-west monsoon, just as the Pamirs are affected, but m varying degrees according to geographical position. In western Tibet, bordering the Kashmir frontier, the climate differs little from that of Ladak. Intense dryness pervades the atmosphere during nine months of the year; but little snow falls, and the western passes are so little subject to intermittent falls of fresh snow as frequently to be traversable during the whole year round (see ). Low temperatures are prevalent throughout these western regions, whose bleak