INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 



By Colonel H. Yule. 



Within the last ten years the exploration of High Asia 

 which, on our side at least, had long been languid, has re- 

 vived and advanced with ample strides. So rapid, indeed, 

 has been the aggression upon the limits of the Unknown 

 that in the contemplation of a future historian of geogra- 

 phical discovery it may easily seem that the contraction 

 of those limits in our age might fitly be compared to the 

 rapid evaporation of the cloud Avith which the breath has 

 tinged a plate of polished steel. 



It is hardly a dozen years since our mapmakers had to 

 rely for the most important positions in Chinese Turkes- 

 tan on the observations of the Jesuit surveyors of the 

 eighteenth century; and as late as the publication of that 

 well-known work of the Messrs. Michell, ' The Russians in 

 Central Asia,' the issuC; in the appendix to that book, of a 

 new and corrected transcript of those data, was regarded as 

 of some geographical moment. The incidental notices 

 contained in fragmentary extracts or translations from 

 medieval Persian writers, and the details given in Chinese 

 geographical works, often hard to understand, often them- 

 selves (like Ptolemy's Tables) only a conversion into writ- 

 ten statement of the graphic representations of loose and 

 inaccurate maps, were painfully studied by those who 

 desired to enlarge or recompile the geography of the 

 great Central basin which lies between the Himalya and 

 the Thian Shan. Indeed, from Samarkand eastward to 

 the caravan-track which leads from the Russian frontier at 

 Kiakhta to the gate of the Great Wall at Kalgan, a space 

 of 47 degrees of longitude, we were entirely dependent on 



