8 The President's remarks on the same. [Jan., 



The President said : — In the paper by Babu Sarat Chandra Das that 

 has just been read there is much of interest to those engaged in investi- 

 gating the history and geography of Tibet, so much indeed that I should 

 not care to detain you even with a part of all that it suggests. With the 

 assistance of the paper, and the notes of General Cunningham, Lieut. 

 J. D. Cunningham, Lieut. H. Strachey, the surveyors of the Great 

 Trigonometrical Survey, Father Desgodins, Captain Giles, and some 

 collected in Kumaon, on the borders of Nari-Khorsum, the $tod Afngah-ri 

 skor-^rsum of the paper, we might now be able to give a reasonable account 

 of Tibetan geography did time and opportunity permit. The country to 

 which the name Tibet is now applied appears in the Chinese annals of the 

 Yang dynasty in the seventh century as T'ufau which should be read 

 Tu-po; the character for ' fan' being phonetic with the two sounds 

 'fan' and ' po.' In the records of the eleventh century, it is known as 

 T'u-pot'e, in which the latter syllable represents ' Po ' or * Bo<2,' and hence 

 the Indian Bhot. The European name is derived from the Mongol in 

 the form Tbt, or Tibt (Tibet), which occurs in the travels of the merchant 

 Sulaiman so early as 851 A. D., and is evidently derived from the Chinese 

 T'u-pot'e. During the Ming dynasty, the name was changed to Wussu- 

 tsang, from the two principal divisions cZVus and #Tsang, hence the 

 modern name Weitsang by which it is known to the Chinese. The word 

 hsi or ' western ' is also applied to the country ; hence ASi-tsang and 

 tfSi-fan, and the people are called Tupote and Tangkute. 



The countries bordering on Tibet are rGya-nak, or ' great black ' 

 (China), that in which the people are usually clothed in black (nalc) : 

 rGya-gar or India, where white (gar) is the usual clothing : rGya-ser, 

 the great yellow (ser) or Russia : h Jang or north-western Tibet : Mon,* 

 the entire Indian Himalaya, and the remainder as in the paper. 

 Amongst the lakes mentioned Mapham^yu-mtsho is the Manasarovara 

 lake so well-known in Sanskrit literature, and which lies to the north of 

 Kumaon : it is called also wTsho ma-dros-pa in the Tibetan books. Tibet 

 has three divisions : — (a)-sTod-mngah-ri skhor-^sura or Little Tibet, 

 the Nari-khorsum of our maps : (b)-dVus and #Tsang or Tibet proper, 

 the U-tsang of our maps : and (c)-mDo, Khams and sGang or Khamyul, 

 Great Tibet on the east. Nari-khorsum is divided into three Provinces, 

 sTag-mo Ladvags to the west ; Guge-buhrang (Purang) in the middle 

 and Mang-yul along the Nepal frontier. According to Strachey, ' nari ' 

 signifies ' clear ' or ' pure,' an appellation probably due to the fine air and 

 water of the country, and ' khorsum ' signifies the three countries or 

 tracts into which the province is divided. sTag-mo Ladvags was for- 



* A male native of Kumaon is oallod Mon-pa by the Huniyas, and a female 

 Mon-mo. 



