January 27, 19 10] 



JVA TURE 



567 



SVEN HEDIN'S '• TRANS-HIMALAYA:" 



"T^ HE special quest of Dr. Sven Hedin in his last 

 -*■ and greatest journey of geographical explor- 

 ation in Tibet was that hitherto unexplored range of 

 mountains, which was believed to rise within the 

 unsurveyed white patch of desert on the " Roof of the 

 World" to the further side of the Tsangpo or Brahma- 

 putra, behind tlie Himalayas. Although this im- 

 mense chain, stretching for about 600 miles, is one 

 of the mighty mountain ranges of the earth, and 

 forms the northern watershed of the great Brahma- 

 putra, as well as of tlie Upper Indus, 

 yet its very existence, even, was 

 largely the subject of conjecture. 



A line of high peaks in this deso- 

 late region was first reported about 

 200 years ago by a party of survexi.i- 

 Lamas, who had been trained and 

 sent out into Tibet by the Jesuits of 

 Peking, under the patronage of iIk- 

 emperor, Kang-hsi ; and the peaks, as 

 located and named by these Tibetans, 

 and rediscovered by recent travellers, 

 figure on the r6ugh map, published 

 by D'Anville, in a.d. 1733. Brian 

 Hodgson, in 1S48, as the result of his 

 inquiries in Nepal, depicted these 

 peaks in his sketch-map as forming 

 portions of a hypothetical range of 

 mountains, stretching continuously 

 from the Karakorum and Pamirs on 

 the west to the Tengri Nor lake near 

 Lhasa on the south-east ; and he 

 assigned to it the name of '" Nyen- 

 chen," after the name of the highest 

 peak near its Lhasa end. In the map 

 attached to Hue's travels, this range 

 is also represented as an unbrolicn 

 chain; and so, too, in Saunder's map 

 of 1S79 in Markham's "Tibet"; 

 whilst Grenard, the companion of the 

 ill-fated de Rhins, in iSgq, indicates 

 it conjecturallv as a double range, 

 which Colonel Burrard, of the Indian 

 Survey, in his recent book on the 

 geographv of Tibet, has called the 

 " Kailas Range," after the famous 

 Mount Olympus of the Hindus, at its 

 northern end. So great, indeed, was 

 the need for the exploration of these 

 mountains deemed to be that the 

 president of the Royal Geographical 

 Society declared a few years ago 

 that : ■' In the w'hole length, from the 

 Tengri Nor to the Mariam La, no 

 one has crossed them, so far as we 

 know " (a statement, by the way, not 

 absolutely correct, as the pundits 

 Nain Sing and A-K. and Littledale 

 had crossed them) " .... I believe 

 nothing in Asia is of greater geo- p, ^ _xhc 



graphical importance than the explor- 

 ation of this range of mountains." 



This, then, is the range to which Dr. Hedin now 

 assigns the appropriate name of "Trans-Himalaya," 

 aftei' having zigzagged across it by eight different 

 passes, and after mapping out its contours in con- 

 siderable detail. 



More than this, the two handsome volumes in which 

 Dr. Hedin tells the story of this great achievement 



1 ■• Trans-Himalaya, Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet." By Sven 

 Hedin. With 388 illustratinns from photographs, watercolour sketches and 

 drawinijs by the author and 10 maps. In 2 vohimes. Vol. i., pp. xxiii-f- 

 436; Vol. ii., pp. xvii+441. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1909.) 



.VO. 2100, VOL. 82] 



differ from all his previous books on the "Forbidden 

 Land " in possessing greater human and living 

 interest. For the first time, after his many previous 

 years of travel in that country, he has been able to 

 penetrate beyond the desolate deserts and reach a 

 portion of what he truly terms "Tibet proper, that is 

 the part chiefly inhabited by a settled population." 

 For this good fortune and for the more friendly treat- 

 ment generally which he experienced at the hands of 

 the Tibetans he is indebted directly to the amicable 

 relations established with Tibet by the British 



Sven Hedm. 

 nbers of the last E.xpedition in Poo. 



' Trans-Himalaya 



mission of 1904. none the less real and genuine 

 though cultivated at the point of the bayonet. These 

 relations of friendship and respect, strengthened and 

 cemented by the visit of the Grand Tashi Lama to 

 India in 1905 to meet the Prince of Wales, have 

 enormously increased the prestige of the European 

 throughout Tibet and Central ."Vsia. Thus, a section 

 of Younghusband's mission with four British officers, 

 unaccompanied by any escort of their own, but relying 

 solely on the protection of the Tibetans, was able 

 to pass in a friendly way through those inhabited dis- 



