










116 é Noles on Central Asia. [No. 3, 
pose of paying homage to the great Khan; they, however, either left no 
description of their journey, or else their accounts are so meagre and 
confused, as for instance, the narrative of Prince Getum, that very few 
of the places mentioned in them can be identified. Much later, in 
1654, Fedor Isakonitch Baikof, the envoy of the Russian Tsar Aleksei 
Fedorovitch, proceeded past lake Faisan, and the upper course of the 
Black Ivtysh, and traversed the whole of Djungaria, reaching the 
Chinese wall at Huhu-Hoton from whence he advanced to Pekin. 
Although Baikof’s marche-route (of course not in the form it is 
inserted in Wilson’s work from which it was derived by Ritter, but 
in the shape we find it in Spasskis’ “ Sibirski Vestnik’”) can, in 
the present state of our knowledge of the geography of Central Asia, 
be pretty readily applied to certain localities, still the information it 
contains is of a meagre character, and is greatly inferior to native 
Chinese accounts. 
The Southern border of the country now under consideration, 
2. e. the gigantic Celestial range, has not been explored by any 
Kuropean traveller up to the present day. The destruction, how- 
ever, of the kingdom of Djungaria, by the Chinese, led to its. being 
surveyed under the superintendence of the European missionaries 
Felix d’Arocha and Hallerstein, by whom astronomical points were 
determined, not alone in the towns of Djungaria and Little Bukhara, 
but also at the very foot of the Celestial range, as at Hongor Olen 
the modern Konur-Ulen, and on the Southern shore of lake Issyk- 
Kul. As the Jesuits have left no record whatever of their having 
visited any part of the Celestial range, it must be naturally concluded 
that they themselves did not diverge from the highroads of Central 
Asia, but detached a party of Chinese topographers, instructed by 
themselves, to the base of the Celestial mountains. 
The first learned Russian traveller who penetrated into the part 
of Inner Asia described in the present volume, was the botanist Sivers, — 
who in his hazardous and venturesome journey to the Tarbagatai, in 
1793, advanced as far as 47° N. Latitude. During the succeeding forty 
years, not one of the scientific explorers of Western Siberia succeeded 
in passing beyond the point previously reached by Sivers. 
The journey of K. A. Meyer in 1826, did not extend beyond the 
Arvkat mountains, Chingiz-tan, and the Karkara district of the Kirghiz 
Steppe. The travels of Humboldt, and his associates, in 1828, did 
