MEDIEVAL TALES OF THE LOP BASIN IN 



CENTRAL ASIA* 



By Ellsworth Huntington 



THE modern West discovered the 

 Lake of Lop-Nor, in Chinese 

 Turkestan, only thirty years ago, 

 yet in the Middle Ages Chaucer and his 

 predecessors seem to have known as 

 much about that region as the average 

 man knows today. In recounting the vir- 

 tues of the Duchess Blanche, Chaucer 

 speaks of the sweet reasonableness with 

 which she treated her many lovers. She 

 did not hold them in suspense, nor for 

 the sake of proving them did she : 



"... Sende men into Walakye, 

 To Pruyse and into Tartarye, 

 To Alisaundre, ne into Turkye, 

 And bid him faste, anoon that he 

 Go hoodless to the Drye See, 

 And come hoom by the Carrenare." 



Apparently the Dry Sea and the Car- 

 renare were the most inaccessible regions 

 of which Chaucer had ever heard, more 

 inaccessible even than Wallachia, Prussia, 

 Tartary, Turkey, and other erstwhile re- 

 mote places of which he knew little. 

 After much discussion by literary critics 

 as to the geography of the places to 

 which the Duchess did not send her lov- 

 ers, Prof. J. L. Lowesf has shown that 

 there can be little doubt that the Car- 

 renare is the small salt lake of Kara-Nor, 

 at the eastern end of Chinese Turkestan. 

 It lies in the vast "Gobi" or "Desert" 

 about 200 miles west of the supposed 

 end of the Great Chinese Wall. As a 

 matter of fact the remains of the wall 

 extend not only to, but beyond the lake, 

 as Dr Stein has recently discovered. Pro- 

 fessor Lowes concludes further that the 

 Dry Sea is the great sandy desert of Tak- 

 lamakan, a few hundred miles to the west 

 of Kara-Nor. It appears to be either this 

 or the broad salt plain of the ancient bed 

 of the Lake of Lop-Nor, between Kara- 

 Nor and Takla-makan. The terrible 



summer heat and winter cold of the whole 

 region make it indeed a place to which 

 few people would be so hardy as to go 

 "hoodless" at any season. 



Apparently European knowledge of 

 Central Asia in Chaucer's day was de- 

 rived more or less directly from the 

 famous Letters of Prester John, perhaps 

 by way of the plagiarized accounts of 

 Sir John Mandeville. Prester John was 

 a semi-mythical Christian prince who is 

 supposed to have lived in Central Asia, 

 and who sent boastful letters to the Pope 

 of Rome in the latter half of the twelfth 

 century. The Letters aroused great in- 

 terest in Europe for three or four cen- 

 turies, and many attempts were vainly 

 made to find the author's country. At 

 first he was supposed to live in Asia, as 

 was probably the case. Hundreds of 

 years after the writing of the letters, how- 

 ever, the Portuguese heard of a Christian 

 king living in Abyssinia, and, supposing 

 him to be the great Prestor John, sent sev- 

 eral expeditions to form an alliance with 

 him. The vaunting boasts of the wide do- 

 minion and great splendor of Prester 

 John, whose butler is said to have been a 

 primate and a king, and his steward an 

 archbishop and a king, are certainly false. 

 Nevertheless the Letters contain a large 

 amount of garbled truth, and their writer 

 must have known a good deal more about 

 Central Asia than has generally been 

 supposed. 



He tells us that, "Among other things 

 which are very wonderful in our country 

 is a sea of sand without water. For the 

 sand moves and swells, in waves in the 

 manner of all seas, and is never still. 

 This sea cannot be crossed either by boat 

 or by any other method, and of what sort 

 the land may be beyond it no one can 

 know. And although water is absent 



* Abstract of an address to the National Geographic Society, January 17, 1908. 

 t Modern Philology, vol. iii, 1905, pp. 1-46. 



