ajorttcU lttitiet0itg ?!Ithrarg 
 
 Jlt^aca. S^etn Qarh 
 
 CHARLES WILLIAM WASON 
 COLLECTION 
 
 CHINA AND THE CHINESE 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 CHARLES WILLIAM WASON 
 CLASS OF 1876 
 1918 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924023251675 
 

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MEMOIR 
 
 OF 
 
 CAPTAIN W. GILL, RE. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY 
 
 AS PREFIXED TO THE 
 
 NEW EDITION OF 'THE RIVER OF GOLDEN SAND' 
 
 By col. H. yule, C.B., R.E. 
 
 PACTOLONQUB PETIT : QUAMVIS NON AUREUS ILLO 
 TEMPORE, NBC CARIS BRAT INVIDIOSUS ARENIS 
 
 Ovid, Met. xi. 
 
 LONDON 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET 
 
 1884 
 
 *OOMKliL I 
 
A BRIEF MEMOIR 
 
 OF 
 
 CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL, R.E. 
 
 William John Gill was born in 1843 at Bangalore, where 
 his father, the late Major Robert Gill, of the Madras Army, 
 then held a temporary staff appointment. Major Gill, an 
 accomplished artist, was the author of those remarkable 
 copies of ancient paintings on the walls of the Ajanta cave- 
 temples which used to adorn the Crystal Palace at Syden- 
 ham, to which they had been lent by the Court of East 
 India Directors, and the destruction of which by the fire 
 there, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, was not the least 
 of the losses caused by that calamity. 
 
 William Gill was educated at Brighton College, where 
 one of his contemporaries was Augustus Margary, his 
 precursor in travel from China to the Irawadi, and also in 
 the nature of his death. 
 
 His character, even in those early days, was resolute, 
 serious, as well as pure ; he was bent on doing his duty and 
 making the best use of his time. His sister writes : — 
 
 . . . When quite a young boy at Brighton College, he asked 
 me to illuminate on a large card the words England expects 
 every man to do his duty. This he had hanging on the wall of 
 his bedroom. 
 
 She mentions also that he had arranged an alarum with 
 mechanism to pull the clothes off him at a very early hour, 
 and he was habitually at work long before breakfast. 
 
[2o] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 He obtained an entrance into the Royal Military 
 Academy, passing out with his commission in the Royal 
 Engineers in 1864. In September, 1869, he went to India, 
 and served there till March, 1871. Just before his return, a 
 distant relation of his mother, who had no family of his 
 own, left Lieutenant Gill a very handsome fortune. Hand- 
 some fortunes do not abound in the Corps, and this circum- 
 stance was the subject of various stories more or less 
 mythical.' It enabled Gill for the rest of his too brief 
 career to give scope to the intense desire for exploration and 
 adventure which was born with him, but which was on every 
 opportunity turned by him into that channel which seemed 
 best calculated to serve the need of England at the time. 
 
 The first occasion of his becoming known as a traveller 
 was when he joined Colonel V. Baker in that journey to 
 Persia of which an account was published by the latter, 
 early in 1876, under the title of 'Clouds in the East' The 
 journey occupied from April, 1873, to the end of that year. 
 The party travelled to Tiflis and Baku, and thence across 
 the Caspian to Ashurada and Astrabad. Finding no possi- 
 bility of exploring the Atrek valley, as they desired, from 
 this quarter, they proceeded to Teheran, visiting on the way 
 that famous palace of Shah Abbas at Ashraf, regarding 
 whose Court there we have such interesting details from 
 Pietro della Valle (16 18), that rare phenomenon among 
 travellers, and, indeed, among writers of any kind, who is 
 
 ' Mr. G. H. Sawtell, Captain Gill's executor, has kindly furnished 
 the following note at my request : 'Alison Maclellan, a daughter of 
 the then Lord Kirkcudbright, about 1732 married John Rutherford, a 
 son of the then Lord Rutherford. Among their grandchildren in one 
 branch was John Rutherford, a merchant, who died 60 years ago, leav- 
 ing a considerable fortune. In another branch were many daughters, 
 one of whom married Mr. Heusch, a, Dutch merchant, while another 
 married a Mr. Lefevre, whose daughter was Mrs. Gill's mother. Frederick 
 Heusch of Wimbledon, the grandson of the Mr. Heusch just mentioned, 
 was the testator under whose will Captain Gill benefited. Frederick 
 Heusch 's mother had inherited from her cousin, John Rutherford, about 
 half of his property. There was, as far as I can ascertain, no male 
 relative of Mr. Heusch, when he died, nearer than Captain Gill. The 
 peerage books do not clearly bear out the statement of Mrs. Gill's 
 mother. The peerages both of Kirkcudbright and Rutherford were 
 contested by many claimants in last century,' 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [21] 
 
 always long — as long as Richardson's novels— but never 
 wearisome. The first course of their travels from Teheran 
 was among the Elburz mountains north of that city, crossing 
 the range by a pass 1 2,000 feet in height, in search of ibex 
 and mouiflon. 
 
 Here is a passage from Gill's account referred to below — 
 
 The tops of these mountains are covered with loose stones. 
 In the winter the cold is of course intense at these immense 
 altitudes, the water in the numerous courses freezes, and the 
 expansion bursts the rock into innumerable fragments. In 
 these solitudes (where down below lies the vast and arid plain 
 stretching towards the horizon, invisible in the dim haze of the 
 desert) is the home of the ibex and moufflon ; and often, when 
 no other sound is to be heard but the scream of an eagle 
 astonished at the unwonted sight of a human being, the metallic 
 ring of the loose stones rolling down the mountain-side attracts 
 the sportsman's notice to a herd of these animals, dashing up 
 what would appear an almost impassable precipice. 
 
 Then, skirting the great mountain Demavend, they 
 descended again into the dense forests of Mazanderan, 
 and recrossing the mountains to Damghan, followed that 
 line of road along the northern border of the Desert of 
 Khorasan, which has been traced by many a traveller from 
 Marco Polo to BaiUie Fraser, and in later years. After 
 visiting Meshhed they struck north to Kila't, the famous 
 stronghold of Nadir Shah. 
 
 ■ Kila't (says Gill) is one of the most remarkable places in 
 the world ; it is a natural fortress, and if anything in the world 
 can be impregnable it is certainly Kila't. The description of 
 the Happy Valley in the romance of ' Rasselas ' might almost 
 be taken for it. It is a large valley, surrounded on all sides by 
 mountains absolutely inaccessible from the outside. At the 
 tops of these mountains can be seen perpendicular cliffs, some 
 200 or 300 feet high. There are five entrances to the valley, 
 through narrow gorges only two or three yards wide, the cliffs 
 on each side towering up like walls. The valley, besides a 
 stream that runs through it, is plentifully supplied with water 
 from springs. . . . The inhabitants have their herds, and culti- 
 vate their com all in the valley,' and consequently they could 
 not be starved out. 
 
[22] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 From this they passed on to the Darah-gaz district, a 
 fertile tract on the northern skirt of the mountains that look 
 down on the Turcoman steppes, inhabited by an old colony 
 of Kurds, and then flourishing under the wise and vigorous 
 rule of their hereditary chief Ilayar Khan. Here Gill was 
 obliged to rest to recover from a strange gun accident which 
 had nearly cut short his career. 
 
 The hillside was broken by steep and rocky ravines, and one 
 had to descend very carefully, creeping down over sloping slabs 
 
 of rock. G , it appears, was making his way down one of 
 
 these places with his gun loaded, but on half-cock, and he had 
 rested it for a moment on a projecting ledge, when, to his 
 horror, it suddenly slipped, and, sliding down muzzle upwards, 
 went off, the discharge being straight at him within three 
 yards. . . . One of his boots (high brown leather riding boots), 
 was cut all to pieces by the shot, and it was an anxious time 
 until we got them off" and examined the injury. . . . Neither 
 vein nor artery had been injured. It was a most merciful 
 escape. — Clouds in the East, pp. 200-201. 
 
 In the same work (p. 224) the author bears testimony to 
 his companion's habitual diligence in survey : — 
 
 G — — was most careful and hardworking in his observations, 
 and for many hundreds of miles never missed an angle in the 
 road he followed, ever marching on, compass and note-book in 
 hand. 
 
 Recrossing the great frontier range (Kuren-dagh) the 
 travellers explored the upper course of the Atrek, and thence 
 went south-west by Jajirm to Shahrud, and rejoined the 
 high road from Meshhed to Teheran. 
 
 Lieutenant Gill read a short but interesting paper on this 
 journey at the Belfast meeting of the British Association in 
 1874. This was published in that valuable but now defunct 
 periodical, the ' Geographical Magazine ' (October of that 
 year), accompanied by a map which embodied Lieutenant 
 Gill's own route-surveys. These surveys, though rough and 
 made under great difficulties, embraced valuable additions 
 to correct geographical knowledge. Major (now Sir Oliver) 
 St. John was at the time of the traveller's return engaged at 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [23] 
 
 the India Office in compiling a new map of Persia, and he has 
 testified warmly to the great advantage he derived fi-om Gill's , 
 MS. routes. Nadir's Kila't had been visited apparently by Sir 
 John M'Neill, in 1838, by the late Colonel Beake,^ and some 
 others ; but so little had been ascertained about its true posi- 
 tion that till Gill's return it appeared in duplicate —not a very 
 uncommon phenomenon in tentative geography — and in two 
 different positions on our maps. Darah-gaz, too, if laid down 
 at all in previous maps, was entered as a town or village, 
 instead of an extensive and flourishing district forming a sepa- 
 rate Government.^ The Corrections which Baker and Gill 
 made as. to the true position and course of the Atr^k were still 
 more important in their political bearing. This matter is 
 summarised in a note from Sir Oliver St. John as follows : — 
 
 About 1869-70 the Russians obtained from the Shah a 
 recognition of their claim to all territory on the eastern shore 
 of the Caspian north of the Atrek river. The Persians (no 
 doubt with truth) affirmed subsequently that their recognition 
 was confined to the littoral, while the Russians contended that 
 their right to all districts north of the Atrek throughout its 
 course had been acknowledged. 
 
 Previous to Gill's journey the Atrek had been represented on 
 our maps as a stream of the orthodox type with numerous " 
 affluents on both banks ; or as a stream with few affluents on 
 the north and many on the south. Inhabited Persian districts 
 were all placed on the south bank ; and taking the Russian 
 definition of their treaty, it looked as if nothing but bare moun- 
 tain and barren desert had been given them. But Gill and 
 
 '' Colonel Beake was a gentleman whose personal history, if written 
 down, would have made a book of very uncommon interest. Originally 
 a subaltern in the Bengal Army, he afterwards served under Abbas 
 Mirza, in Khorasan. That prince made him a grant of the famous 
 turquoise mines of Nishapur, but the grantee never was able to realise 
 the concession ! In his latter years Colonel Beake was engaged in 
 various mining projects in the" Kingdom of Naples, and in Sicily. The 
 present writer once travelled with htm from Palermo to, London, and 
 was entertained the whole way by his personal reminiscences, told with 
 extraordinary vivacity. Colonel Beake was a brother of the late well- 
 known Dr. Beke, but they differed about many things, including even 
 the spelling of their names. 
 
 ' Bailing Fraser on both his jourueys to Khorasan was prevented 
 from visiting Kila't. On his second journey (1833) he reached Darah- 
 gaz, but on this journey he carried no instruments. 
 
[24] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 Baker found that the main stream of the Atrek had no southern 
 ^ aflSuents, but many northern ones, and that its north bank for 
 a considerable distance from its source was lined with Persian 
 towns and villages. One entire district, Darah-Gaz, lying quite 
 clear of the river to the north, was practically discovered by 
 them. The result was that we were able to back up the 
 ■Persians in their interpretation of the understanding about 
 the Atrek by appealing to facts, and that the Russians at last 
 modified their claim. 
 
 The next enterprise on which the young officer embarked 
 was of a very different character. • In the spring of 1874, 
 after the Chief Engineer of the State had laid that unexpected 
 petard of dissolution by which himself and all his crew were 
 hoist, Lieutenant Gill presented himself to the metropolitan 
 borough of Hackney as a Conservative candidate. He was 
 at the bottom of the poll, which ran : Reed, 6,968 ; Holms, 
 6,893; Gill, 6,310. But in consequence of mismanagement 
 in the ballot, then first introduced, the election was invali- 
 dated. When the new election took place three months ■ 
 later, Gill stood again against Mr. Fawcett and Mr. Holms, 
 and was again defeated, though carrying the respectable 
 number of 8,994 votes. Captain Gill stood for Nottingham 
 at the general election six years later, with similar bad suc- 
 cess ; and the whole process on that occasion so wearied and 
 disgusted him that he said he would never try the experiment 
 again. 
 
 He has not been forgotten at Hackney, and after the 
 announcement of his loss, eight years later, a letter reached 
 his family from that borough, expressing this in a very kindly 
 way. 
 
 Gill's name as that of a brother officer was well known 
 to me, through the travels in Persia and the Hackney 
 rejection, but we had never met till one day, in May 1876, 
 when he visited me at the India Office, and announced that 
 he was meditating an expedition by way of Western China 
 into either Tibet or Eastern Turkestan, and wished to con- 
 sult me. One of the suggestions made was to make Marco 
 Polo his bosom friend, and this he cherished atid acted 
 upon throughout his travels ; but I also introduced him to 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [25] 
 
 two men who could advise him from singular practical ex- 
 perience — I mean Baron Ferdinand v. Richthofen and Mr. 
 T. T. Cooper. 
 
 Of Baron Richthofen I will venture to quote words 
 written on another occasion : — 
 
 It is true that the announcement of his presence at the 
 evening meetings (of the Royal Geographical Society) would 
 draw no crowds to the doors ; no extra police would be required 
 to keep the access ; no great nobles would interest themselves 
 about engaging St. James's Hall for his reception, ... but it is 
 a fact that in his person are combined the great traveller, the 
 great physical geographer, and the accomplished writer, in a 
 degree unknown since Humboldt's best days. In the actual 
 extent of his journeys in China, he has covered more ground 
 than any other traveller of note, and he has mapped as he went. 
 His faculty of applying his geological knowledge to the physical 
 geography of the country he traverses is very remarkable, but 
 not more so than his power of lucid and interesting exposition. 
 
 Gill went to Berlin to visit him, and the fullness and 
 cordiality with which his advice and information were com- 
 municated are recorded by Gill near the beginning of the 
 narrative of his own travels in China : — 
 
 Hour after hour he gave up his valuable time to me, and 
 opened volumes from his rich store of infonnation. . . . Baron 
 von Richthofen possesses in a remarkable manner the faculty of 
 gathering up the details presented to his view ; putting them 
 together and generalising on them with rare judgment ; forming 
 out of what would be to a lesser genius but scattered and un- 
 intelligible fragments, a uniform and comprehensive whole. . . . 
 not one hint was given me that did not subsequently prove its 
 value ; his kind thoughts for my comfort and amusement were 
 never ceasing, and his refined and cultivated intellect and genial 
 manner rendered the recollections of my stay in the German 
 capital some of the most pleasant in my life. — Vol. i. p. 3. 
 
 T. T. Cooper was far from any pretension to be classed 
 as a traveller with Richthofen, but he was one of the most 
 adventurous explorers of our time ; he was the first, with 
 the exception of the French missionary priests, to penetrate 
 the mountains west of Szechuen : and had indeed made 
 
{26] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 two bold attempts, one from that side and a second from 
 the side of Assam, to force that Tibetan barrier which re- 
 mains yet unpierced between India and China. It is 
 curious that whilst Mr. Cooper was one of the last persons 
 with whom Lieutenant Gill took counsel (it was in my room 
 at the India Office) regarding his joyrney, before quitting 
 England, it was the same Cooper who received the traveller 
 with open arms and hearty hospitality at Bhamb on the 
 Irawadi, when he emerged from the wilds of the Chinese 
 frontier in November, 1877. A few months later (April 
 24, 1878) poor Cooper, in his solitary residence at Bhamo, 
 was murdered by a soldier of his sepoy guard. 
 
 Gill reached Peking September 21, 1876, and wasted no 
 time there, for on the 25th he had already entered on his 
 first journey in China. This, which was made in the north 
 of Pechili to the borders of Liaotung and the sea-terminus 
 of the Great Wall, was but a trial of his pinions ; the next 
 journey was one of far larger scope. It began with the ascent 
 of the Yang-Tzii as far as Ch'ung-Ch'ing in Ssu-Ch'uan, 
 and so far he had the best companion probably that he 
 could have found in all China, Mr. Edward Colborne Baber, 
 now Chinese Secretary to our Embassy. From Ch'ung- 
 Ch'ing he travelled to Ch'eng-Tu-Fu, the famous capital of 
 Ssu-Ch'uan. Here he had to delay his advance some time, 
 in hope of being joined by Mr. Mesny, a Jerseyman, who 
 had spent many years in the interior of China in the service 
 of the Chinese Government. The delay was spent in an 
 excursion from Ch'eng-Tu to the Alps in the north of 
 Ssii-Ch'uan, those ' Min Mountains ' of the ancient Yii-Kung, 
 from which the great Kiang of the Chinese, ' the River ' 
 par excellence (for this, and not the Kinsha from Tibet and 
 Yun-nan, they regard as the main stream), flows down into 
 Ssii-Ch'uan. So far as I know, no traveller had preceded 
 Gill in that part of China. The journey formed a loop of 
 some 400 miles, and occupied a month or more. On the 
 day after his return to Ch'eng-Tu Mr. Mesny appeared. 
 
 Hitherto Gill's aspirations had been directed to a 
 journey through North-West China to Kashgaria and so 
 to Europe. But the troubled aspect of affairs between 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [27] 
 
 Russia and England now threatened to render this issue 
 impracticable ; while at a time of possible war, when duty 
 might be calling him to quite another field in the west, he 
 felt especially unwilling to risk seclusion in some Asiatic 
 oil de sac. He was forced to the conclusion that his steps 
 must be directed' homeward ; but this homeward route 
 might still be one which no European had yet achieved. 
 So he started from Ch'eng-Tu for England via Eastern Tibet 
 and the Irawadi. 
 
 Ta-Chien-Lu, Gill's first place of halt after leaving Ch'eng- 
 Tu, is the Chinese Gate of Tibet on the Ssii-Ch'uan frontier. 
 Politically speaking, it is more correctly the gate between 
 what we should call, in Anglo-Indian phrase, the Chinese 
 ' regulation province ' of Ssii-Ch'uan and the Chinese ' non- 
 regulation province ' of the Tibetan Marches. It was also 
 the residence of the late Bishop Chauveau, of the French 
 Missions, an old man whose noble presence and benigi* 
 character seem to have deeply impressed every traveller 
 who came in contact with him.'' Captain Gill has told the 
 story of the Chinese etymology of Ta-Chien-Lu ('the Arrow 
 Forge'), but it is a Chinese fancy. The name is really 
 Tibetan — Tartsendo — ' confluence of the Tar and Tsen,' as 
 Mr. Baber states, in that admirable and delightful narrative, 
 published in the spring of 1882 by the Royal Geographical 
 Society, which the periodical Press has allowed to pass 
 almost absolutely unnoticed — taking it, I suppose, for a Blue- 
 book, because it is blue ! 
 
 From Ta-Chien-Lu (8,340 ft.) Gill mounted at once to the 
 
 ' See the River of Golden Sand, original edition, vol. ii. pp.111,112, 
 and the present volume, p. iSj. Mr. Cooper says : ' I perceived a 
 venerable old man, dressed in Chinese costume, with a long snow-white 
 beard. I shall never forget him as long as I live. He was sixty years 
 of age, forty of which he had spent in China as a missionary — his long 
 illness made him look older ; his countenance was very beautifiil in its 
 benignity ; his eye, undimmed by age and suffering, lighted on me with 
 a kindly expression, and he bade me welcome in English, which 
 he had learned from his mother, an English lady, with a tremulous but 
 musical voice.' And again : ' The kindness of the people of Ta-tsian- 
 loo had made a deep impression on me, and in taking leave of the 
 kind old bishop, who with tears in his eyes invoked a blessing upon 
 me, my emotion checked all utterance.' — Travels, pp. 181, 222. 
 
[28] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 summit level of the great Tibetan tableland, on which, with 
 the exception of one or two dips into the gorges of great 
 rivers, he might have continued his way, should lamas and 
 such-like have withdrawn opposition, without ever descend- 
 ing below 1 1,000 ft., until he hailed the Russian outposts on 
 the northern skirts of Pamir, 1,800 miles away. He continued 
 his journey by Lit'ang (13,280 ft.) to Bat'ang (8,546 ft.) in a 
 tributary valley of the great Kin-sha, and then crossing that 
 river, the real parent stream of the Yang-Tzu according to our 
 notions, he turned south, travelling parallel to the river, and 
 frequently along its banks, for twenty-four marches, on his 
 way to Ta-Li-Fu. At this city, the western capital of Yun- 
 nan, and the Carajan of Marco Polo, he may be said to have 
 emerged from terra incognita, and there the most laborious 
 part of his daily task ceased ; for the route thence to the 
 Irawadi had been already surveyed by Mr. Baber when 
 accompanying the Grosvenor mission to inquire into the 
 murder of Margary. 
 
 The region north of Ta-Li-Fu traversed by Gill and Mesny 
 presents a singular congeries of tribes. Two of the most 
 prominent, the MUsus and the Lisiis, are not without claims 
 to civilisation, and their women wear picturesque and grace- 
 ful costumes bearing a strong analogy to those old fashions 
 of Swiss or Pyrenean valleys, popular types for fancy balls. 
 
 The Miisds, who call themselves Ndshi, are said formerly 
 to have possessed a kingdom, the capital of which was Li- 
 Kiang-Fu, which the Tibetans, and the hill-people generally, 
 call Sadam. Their king bore the Chinese style of Mu-tien- 
 wang, and M. Desgodins, from whose authority these facts 
 are derived, says that frequently during his journeys on the 
 banks of the Lan-T'sang and the Lu-Kiang he has come upon 
 the ruins of Miisii forts and dwellings, 'as far north as 
 Yerkalo and further,' therefore as far north as Kiangka 
 {about lat. 30°), or nearly so. 
 
 Gill met with some Miisds at or near Kudeu on the 
 Kin-sha, and he was much struck by the European aspect of 
 a lama (or quasi-lama) who visited him, ' more like a French- 
 man than a Tibetan.' This recalled to him what Mr. Baber 
 says of two women, called ' of Kutung,' whom he met near 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [29] 
 
 Tali. These Kutung people were also encountered on their 
 travels further south, in the later journey of Mr. A. R. 
 Colquhoun. ^ 
 
 The Lisds, or Lissaus, again, are described by Dr. 
 Anderson as ' a small hill-people, with fair, round, flat faces, 
 high cheek-bones, and some little obliquity of the eye. The 
 men adopt the Shan dress, and the women, like those of the 
 Milsiis, a picturesque costume of their own. In the upper 
 parts of the great valleys, the Lisiis seem intermixed with the 
 Miisds, but they have a wide and sparse distribution further 
 to the west, and further to the south. 
 
 The onward track from Tali was no longer new. The 
 Irawadi was reached and descended, and Captain Gill, after 
 a short stay in Calcutta, reached England again, after twenty 
 months of travel. 
 
 His journal was eventually (1880) published by Mr. 
 Murray in two volumes, under the title of ' The River of 
 Golden Sand ' (the real translation of ' Kin-Sha-Kiang '), and 
 it had with the public a^ fair, though hardly a brilliant suc- 
 cess, being certainly too bulky, though free from anything 
 like padding. 
 
 The present volume is an endeavour to do more justice 
 to the essential merits of the book, by presenting it in a 
 shorter form. It was thought that no one was more 
 capable of accomplishing the abridgment judiciously than 
 Gill's attached friend and fellow-traveller, Mr. Baber ; and 
 happily he has been able to accept the task to which he was 
 invited. 
 
 Before the book appeared the merits of Gill's enterprise 
 were recognised by one of the two gold medals of the Royal 
 Geographical Society (May 26, 1879). 
 
 The award declared this to be assigned on account 
 
 Of the admirable geographical work performed during two 
 long journeys of exploration, voluntarily undertaken along the 
 northern frontier of Persia in 1873, and over previously un- 
 travelled ground in Western China and Tibet in 1877, and 
 especially for the careful series of hypsometrical observations 
 and the traverse-survey made during the latter journey, by 
 which we have for the first time the means of constructing with 
 
[3o] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 considerable accuracy profile sections of those elevated and 
 little-known regions. Also for the elaborate Memoir contributed 
 to the Journal of the Society on the subject of his expedition, 
 and for, the maps of his route in 42 sheets, on a scale of two 
 miles to the inch. 
 
 The Paris Geographical Society also in the following 
 year bestowed one of their gold medals on him. It is right 
 to remind readers that the bright personal narrative in his 
 book, as has been indicated by the award just quoted, does 
 not represent Captain Gill's scientific results. Any one who 
 desires to appreciate the real character of his labours must 
 look at the memoir just referred to (' Journal of the Royal 
 Geographical Society,' vol. xlviii. pp. 57, seqq.). From his 
 first departure to the north from Ch'eng-Tu, till his arrival at 
 Ta-Li-Fu, a route survey was constantly kept up, while obser- 
 vations for altitude with aneroids and with Casella's hypso- 
 metric thermometer were taken daily at frequent intervals. 
 The itinerary appended to the report in the memoir contains 
 a mass of minute detail, filling between Ch'eng-Tu and 
 Momien (near the Burmese frontier) 46 pages of very close 
 print. 
 
 Here it may be well to repeat part of a passage quoted 
 by the present writer, in the original issue of his introductory 
 essay to ' The River of Golden Sand,' from a letter of Baron 
 von Richthofen, which carries great weight : — 
 
 Captain Gill's results have been of the highest interest to 
 me, particularly those of his journey north of Ch'Sng-Tu, and of 
 his route between Ta-tsien-lu and Atentze. He is an acute 
 observer of men and nature, and stands very high indeed by the 
 accuracy and persistency with which he has carried through his 
 surveying work. . . . Many a famous traveller might learn in 
 this respect from Captain Gill. The determination of so many 
 altitudes is, too, a very important part of his work. ... I regret 
 however that he did not put down on the map all that he was able 
 to see. ... I presume that Captain Gill wished, .... by the 
 tendency to the utmost possible exactness, to abstain from laying 
 down on his map whatever was lying at some distance from the 
 road. I think it would be well if he could be induced to supply 
 this want. 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [31] 
 
 The regret expressed in these last words has seemed to 
 me well founded, as well as the praise in those that precede 
 them. But Mr. Baber alleges that it is hardly ever possible 
 to get a view of the run of the mountain ranges. 
 
 Not long after his return from China, and whilst the 
 negotiations at Santo Stefano were going on, Captain Gill 
 went off with a friend, rather suddenly, to the Danube, with 
 the view of visiting the scenes of recent war in the provinces 
 about to be detached from Turkey. But the Russian, 
 officials were too much for Gill and his companion, who 
 did not succeed in getting beyond Giurgevo. They took 
 their revenge by making fun of the Muscovites in ' Vanity 
 Fair.'^ This escapade dwells in my recollection from the 
 circumstance that an invitation which had been sent to his 
 rooms in Westminster was answered by a telegram from 
 Bucharest. 
 
 In the spring of 1878 Captain Gill was sent to Constan- 
 tinople on duty, in association with Major Clarke, R.A., as 
 assistant in the commission on the settlement of the new 
 Asiatic boundary between Turkey and Russia, consequent 
 on the Treaty of Berlin. Owing to differences of opinion 
 between the English and Russian members as to a portion 
 of the line to be followed, the commission did not that year 
 leave Constantinople ; and Gill, after kicking his heels 
 between Constantinople and Therapia for many months, 
 came home. In the following year a fresh comniission was 
 appointed of which Sir E. Hamley was the head, and the 
 work was accomplished. 
 
 I extract a passage or two from his journal during the 
 stay on the Bosphorus : — 
 
 April 12. — As he (B- — ) remarks, this is a wonderful 
 country. He has no money and no transports ; there are 
 absolutely no means for doing anything, and yet, he says, the 
 
 things will get done somehow, as they always do. H says 
 
 the same thing ; sometimes they come to him, andtell him that 
 there is no rice for the men, none to be had anywhere, none to 
 
 ' ' Arrested by the Russians '- -in the numbers of that paper for 
 June I, 8, and 15, 1878. . 
 
 b 
 
[32] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 be bought, no money to pay for any, and the prospect of the 
 whole fleet starving is opened up, but just at the last moment a 
 week's supply turns up from somewjiere, no one knows where, 
 and no one knows how. The astounding way in which this 
 country lives from hand to mouth is almost beyond belief. 
 
 • April 14.— Scobeleff says that no sane being in Russia 
 imagines for a moment that the Russian policy is not India, and 
 
 he said to B : ' We shall get there — we shall creep on and 
 
 on, for there will always be plenty of fools in England who will 
 believe that we are not doing so ; and then some day when you 
 English are unprepared we shall strike the blow. Why of course 
 we all want India ! . . . We can't touch you anywhere, thanks 
 to your silver streak. But by advancing towards India we 
 obliterate that silver streak, and at last when we are near 
 enough you will become vulnerable.' 
 
 Again, in the summer of 1880, when the news of the 
 defeat of Maiwand reached England, Captain Gill obtained 
 some months' leave and hurried to the scene of expected 
 action in retrieval of that disaster. But Roberts had made 
 yet better haste, and Gill did not reach Quetta till Candahar 
 had been relieved and Ayub beaten. Eager for some active 
 employment, he was allowed to join Sir Charles Macgregor 
 in his well-conducted but almost bloodless expedition against 
 the Maris, with the duty of a survey-officer. I shall make a few 
 extracts from his diaries again.^ 
 
 August 20 (in the train on his way to Brindisi). — The lamps 
 are lit, beds made up and everyone turned in but me. I sat 
 long looking at the moon rising over the calm blue sea ; then, 
 as to my mind all earthly sounds were hushed — hushed the 
 rattle of the train, the hum of human voices, the murmur of the 
 waves — in the spirit I seemed to look with the moon and stars at 
 my own land with all that it contained — all the strifes, passions, 
 loves, struggles, jealousies, hates — and, looked at from that 
 distance, from the serene depths of the heavens, where all is 
 order, all is regularity, how petty, mean, and miserable seemed 
 the aims of all earthly creatures. 
 
 September 12 (on the railway in Sind crossing the Desert to 
 Sibi). — I awoke in the Desert. As far as eye can range, nothing 
 
 ' The italicising of a few characteristic passages in the journals is 
 editorial. 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [33] 
 
 but an absolute plain of sand as flat as a billiard table, with not 
 a blade of grass. The Desert of Persia and the Desert in 
 Egypt are nothing to this of Sinde, and the railway was laid 
 across it at the rate of two miles a day. Water-trains for the 
 thousands of labourers had to be sent up, I think, twice a day, 
 and they only broke down once. The labourers were then 
 without water for sixteen hours, which must have been hoiirs of 
 actual torment. For a stretch of 80 miles, there is not one drop 
 of water in the blazing sun of almost the hottest place in the 
 world. Arrived at Sibi. Trains are continually coming in, 
 hundreds of coolies always shouting, piles upon piles of bales of 
 commissariat stores lying about ; everything looks like overword 
 in the blazing sun. 
 
 September 15 (after passing up the Bolan). — There is some- 
 thing in mountain air quite different to anything else, it seems 
 so elastic and invigorating, it has such a distinct individuality 
 that you recognise it at once ; it is like the Chinaman— exactly 
 the same wherever you meet it ; and as you get to a height of 
 about 6,000 feet, you suddenly recollect the feelings you have 
 experienced before, and in a moment what pictures memory 
 conjures up ! The Alps, the Caucasus, Persia, China, and Tibet, 
 where the same feeling has been experienced, — you find it at 
 about 6,000 feet above the sea, but not much lower, — and once 
 having felt the exhilaration, you never forget it and always long 
 for it. 
 
 September 17 (in the Desert called Dasht-i-Bedaulat).— We 
 got on cheerily enough, meeting every here and there a string 
 of camels. Now that Ayub Khan has been so thoroughly 
 beaten the people are very civil and make profound salaams, 
 with every expression of friendship, but would cut one's throat 
 w th the greatest pleasure all the same ; that is prestige amongst 
 Asiatics ! People at home sometimes sneer at prestige, but if 
 they had marched over this road a month ago and again now, 
 they would go home wiser and give up sneering at prestige. 
 
 September 25. — They say that the defeat of Khushk-i-Nakhud 
 (Maiwand) was all but a victory. Ayub Khan wrote a letter to 
 
 the Khan of Kelat describing it. D ■ saw this letter, and it 
 
 said it was the most desperate battle ever fought in Afghanistan ; 
 the letter was far from being boastful. There is no doubt that 
 
 if had not kept the cavalry under fire for hours doing 
 
 nothing, and thus demoralised them, they would have been able 
 to charge, and so counteract the attack of the Ghazis on our 
 left flank. 
 
 b2 
 
[34] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 September 26. — It seems as if in some terrible convulsion 
 of nature one end of the valley had suddenly sunk and broken 
 the mountain ridges on each side, as you would snap a piece 
 of wood, thus foi'ming what are called rifts ; these are simply 
 cracks, going from the top to the bottom of the mountain, 
 quite narrow and with huge perpendicular walls. This rift is 
 not 10 yards wide, and the cliffs rise perpendicularly on either 
 side some 1,500 feet. 
 
 He gives a most painful picture of the sudden aban- 
 donment of the railway line on the hills between Sibi and 
 Quetta, which had been ordered on the arrival of the news 
 of Maiwand : — 
 
 Octobers (at Kotali). — There is about a mile of railway laid 
 here, and a locomotive stands on it which the Maris tried to 
 destroy. They have, however, burnt all the woodwork of it, 
 and the few carriages that were there. The scene of desolation 
 is really shameful. Here is a photograph book, there a dozen 
 or so of novels, the remains of a printing press, the telescope of 
 a theodolite, half a box of cigars (spoilt) ; a packet of letters 
 
 was picked up by St. V ; Col. L 's chest of drawers, or 
 
 rather the remains of it, lie on the ground ; broken wheelbar- 
 rows, chairs, tables, washhand-stands, strew the ground. The 
 General looted a pewter pot. And the amount of stationery and 
 printed forms everywhere, is astonishing; they fairly litter the 
 road for miles. 
 
 The last feature is strikingly characteristic of Anglo- 
 India ! 
 
 October 7. — We continue our march down the river, the 
 scene of wreck and ruin being more apparent than ever ; 
 broken carts and wheelbarrows ; broken -open cartridge-boxes 
 and cash-boxes, old portmanteaus, quantities of books — novels, 
 books of poetry, the Polite Letter Writer (! !), mathematical 
 tables, engineers' books — and then the scene of the fight with 
 a couple of grinning skulls to remind one of the disgraceful 
 disaster. ... It has been a mistake, I think, bringing the 
 Bengal Sepoys down this way, for they open their eyes in 
 astonishment, and say that they could not have believed that 
 such a disaster could have occurred to the Government. I 
 
 suppose that could never have received or even asked for 
 
 the sanction of the Government. It seems impossible to believe 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [35] 
 
 that the Government would thus have madly sacrificed such a 
 vast amount of valuable property for nothing. 
 
 October 12. — I always remember what I do on October 12 
 [a family aniversary]. Once I was at Kalat-i-Nadiri, in Persia 
 (vide ' Clouds in the East '), once I was at Shan-hai-Kuan ; the 
 next year I remember drinking Robert's health when I was 
 with Mesny, though exactly where I do not know.' Now I 
 shall be at the camp two miles south of Kalat-i-Kila. 
 
 I now discovered that M'C 's syce had bolted (his 
 
 servant had disappeared some days before with 40 rupees) — , 
 
 and that all of C 's and St. V 's mules had vanished. 
 
 Naturally I felt for them ; — as my box had to be carried by 
 their mules ! If I had not had that box, no doubt the misfortunes 
 of my good friends would have given me great satisfaction. 
 MacGregor, however, appeared like the good fairy, and sup- 
 plied some animals, but these did not start till about 7. I 
 found a table lying about ; — everyone had gone, and all their 
 property. It was a table I did not recognise, and was smaller 
 than most. This was a sore temptation. Good people say 
 you should resist temptation. I did not even try. I am a bold 
 bad man ! I bid the muleteer put the table on the top of my 
 box. It is a beautiful table; it does not weigh a couple of 
 pounds. I stole that table ; I am a thief and I feel no remorse 
 whatever. I took the table to camp : I asked several people if 
 it was theirs (carefully selecting those who would I knew reply 
 in the negative). Then I felt my bosom swell with pride at the 
 excess of my honesty ! ' Anyhow, I've got the table and intend 
 to stick to it. If anyone claims it I shall swear he's a liar. I 
 shall ask him if he wants to impugn my honour ; I shall look 
 fierce and draw my sword ! 
 
 October, lb (Camp at Kwat). — The Goorkhas are wonder- 
 ful little fellows on the mountain side ; they are just like goats, 
 and hop and skip about where I am obliged to go mincingly 
 holding on by hands and feet; they are certainly the best 
 soldiers we have in India, and perhaps out of it. 
 
 October 21 (Camp, Biland Well).— The Bombay troops 
 deserve everything that has been said about them; their 
 arrangements are miserable, their commissariat and transport 
 ineflScient, their sepoys weak, sickly and useless ; they never 
 kept together, never lent a hand to anyone else, but directly a 
 
 ' At Vung-Chang-Fu (Vochar of Marco Polo) on the Chino-Burman 
 frontier (see Kiver of Golden Sand, orig. ed. ii. 337). 
 
[36] ■ A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 load came off one of their animals, they laid themselves down to 
 sleep and expected some one else to do their work. 
 
 October 22. — The march we made yesterday was really a 
 very remarkable one, and in all probability the most difficult 
 accomplished during the whole Afghan war ; the want of water 
 was the most terrible thing, and it was lucky it was not hot ; if 
 it had been and we had been opposed, I really don't believe the 
 march would have been possible. As it was we lost about 60 
 animals and the Bombay troops lost about 100. 
 
 October 29.^The Goorkhas, B said, worked like bricks, 
 
 always cheerful ; they crack their jokes under the most dismal 
 circumstances, have no sense of fear, and can run up hills and 
 mountains like goats. 
 
 October 30 (after reaching Karam Khan). — I can't make out 
 yet whether these people are friends or foes. Some are Pathans — 
 these are friends ; some are Maris — these are enemies. Affairs 
 are complicated because the Maris have driven out the Pathans, 
 taken their fields, and then let the Pathans come back as tenants. 
 
 Query, then, are the crops the crops of the Mari robber 
 proprietors, or of the Pathan tenants (not at will, but much 
 against their will) ? The difference between this place and 
 Ireland is, that in Ireland tenants kill their landlords, here the 
 landlords kill the tenants. 
 
 November 2 (near Mamand). — The General had intended 
 (if a peaceful arrangement had not been attained) to have sent 
 half his force to Kahan, to have taken the other half to Safid 
 Tok ; he had made arrangements for both the forces from 
 ThuU and from Kwat Mandai to have converged at the same 
 time, and if it had been fighting it would simply have been 
 slaughter. One cannot help^ feeling glad that this has been 
 avoided, even though we lose the medal we might have got if 
 the Maris had been pitched into. 
 
 November 4 (at Khanki). — I am always much amused at 
 the discussion of heights and distances. Says someone to me 
 (I am, I believe, the only man in the force with a barometer), 
 'Well, Gill, what did we come down to-day?' I observe 530 
 feet. ' Oh,' says my interlocutor, ' we came down double that.' 
 I always now expect this answer, so say nothing ; he generally 
 finishes by writing down the height I gave him. 
 
 November 15 (between Fatehpur and Rajanpur).— What a 
 treat to see an avenue of acacias and babul trees, not scrubby 
 bushes ! How our eyes revelled in the cultivated fields and 
 gardens ! This is peace ; these are the effects of a few years of 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [3-/] 
 
 wise rule. This place was a desert a few years ago, now there 
 is prosperity and safety for everyone. 
 
 November 17. — Got up at 6 and started about 7. The air 
 was fresh but very damp, owing to the proximity of the mighty 
 stream of Indus. . . . We determined to ride straight in and 
 breakfast at the Railway Station, Kahnpur. I never enjoyed a 
 ride more. Of course it was over the perfectly flat plain, but 
 after the dreary deserts of Baluchistan, the plain of Bhawalpur 
 looked a very garden, though people from India look on it 
 more or less as a howling wilderness. There were nice villages 
 ensconced in trees, large bar trees, babuls, and date-palms ; 
 plains of rich green grass ; sugar-cane khets, and rice fields 
 spoke of peace and a peaceful quiet rule. It was indeed re- 
 freshing, and quite raised our spirits to see the fine lirge 
 villages, the ryots at work with their ploughs, the many travellers 
 on the roads, all of whom salaam, or give a pleasant answer to 
 the usual inquiry of ' How far off?' The very droning of the 
 Persian wheels, monotonous noise though it be, was pleasant 
 enough, for it spoke of irrigation and fruitful fields, industry 
 and prosperity. 
 
 Qf Gill's employment on the Mari Expedition, its leader, 
 Sir Charles Macgregor, writes to me thus : — 
 
 Gill came out to Quetta, just as my brigade was going off, 
 and I was very glad to take him with me. He undertook and 
 carried out in the most conscientious manner a survey of the 
 country we went over, and though this was of itself a sufficiently 
 laborious task for any man, he was always ready to lend a hand 
 where he could be useful ; he did many times prove of great 
 assistance to me, and in my despatch I mentioned being 
 specially indebted to him. After we got back, without any rest 
 he started off for Merv, by way of Bandar Abbass. 
 
 He was a great favourite with the whole force, and I am 
 sure I have met few men of whom I have had such a high 
 opinion. As a subordinate I know how reliable he was, and I 
 always felt that if his day ever came he would not shine less aw 
 a commander. 
 
 I cannot conclude these few remarks better than by tran- 
 scribing what Col. Brackenbury writes to me of him : ' There 
 are few men like him ; few who have ever combined such a 
 gallant spirit with such unassuming modesty ; ' every word of 
 which I can heartily endorse. 
 
[38] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 In Gill's personal journal for his family, he notes under 
 November 3 : — 
 
 As for my march, is it not written in the book of Chronicles 
 of my official Diary, where an accurate description of every 
 yard is written ? 
 
 Gill had leave still available when he reached the coast, 
 and determined to make use of it in a bold attempt to reach 
 Merv. He embarked at Karachi on December 4, for Bandar 
 Abbas, and travelled by Sirjan, Kirman, Yezd, and Teheran 
 to Meshhed. His original intention had been to go direc 
 from Kerman to Meshhed, but this was impracticable on 
 account of the snow in the high tracts to be passed. At 
 Meshhed he found the expedition to Merv impossible, with- 
 out permission from home and extension of leave. He 
 would have been certain to overstay his leave, and had there- 
 fore to return (riding chappa) to Teheran, to meet the reply 
 which was, as he had feared, a refusal. The complaints of 
 M. de Giers about ' the English officers who haunted the 
 frontier ' were recent. Gill returned from Teheran, crossing 
 the Caspian from Enzeli to Baku, and thence by Tiflis and 
 across the Caucasus, and so home by Moscow and Berlin. 
 At Tiflis, where he stopped a few days, he made a variety of 
 acquaintances, and met many whom he had known at Con- 
 stantinople. By somewhat desperate efforts he reached 
 Moscow on March 28, and London on April i, 1881, the 
 day his leave expired. His sister writes : 'William tele- 
 graphed to us at home to dine with him on his arrival that 
 evening, tired though he must have been.' Tired enough 
 surely ! He had been just nine days travelling from Tiflis to 
 his chambers in Edinburgh Mansions, Victoria Street. We 
 give a few extracts from the journal of this Persian episode : — 
 
 December 13 (at mouth of Pass above Bandar Abbas). — The 
 moon was still well up and the stars shone brightly, so that it 
 was easy to see to pack up. We turned up a narrow and quite 
 dry gorge ; in this light it had a most weird aspect ; the light 
 was no doubt deceptive, but it looked as if the rocks were going 
 to precipitate themselves into the valley. The precipices 
 seemed to rise straight up and overhang the road, the lights 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM /OlfN GILL. [39] 
 
 and shadows were quite startling, and the effect was heightened 
 by the abominable nitrous smell that pervaded the place. The 
 gorge twisted and turned like some horrid snake, between great 
 masses of bare rock. 
 
 December i\ (at Saidabad, on the way to Kirmdn). — I am 
 somewhat dismal at the prospect of a complete failure, which it 
 seems I must look forward to — and I fancy my writing, dis- 
 jointed and disconnected, reflects my dismal frame of mind. 
 
 Thought my plans well over and determined to abandon the 
 enterprise (of getting to Merv), which now appears hopeless. 
 The direct road to Meshhed was said to be blocked with snow, 
 and they will not undertake the journey to Kirmd,n under five 
 days. 1 am also met with the pleasing intelligence that the 
 road beyond Kirmdn is impassable even for the post messengers 
 • — and what that means in these countries where post messengers 
 are supposed to go through anything, can be imagined. 
 
 I could not Ifeave Kirmin before January i, and I should 
 have 50 days only at the outside to do at least 1,000 miles, and 
 in all probability less time to do much more. I am therefore 
 determined to go to Kirm£n without baggage animals, get my 
 letters, &c., and come back here as quickly as possible, and so 
 on to Shiraz, whence I shall ride post to Teheran and so 
 home. 
 
 December 23. — Munshi, who had never seen snow, remarked 
 that it was the funniest sort of rain he had evei- seen in his life. 
 
 December 25 (Caravanserai at Akhar-abad, between Mashis 
 and Kirmdn). — Looking back there was a splendid panorama 
 of snowy mountains, nearly all round, Kuh-Kala-Asker rising 
 grandly above them all ; but somehow I find that snow-moun- 
 tains, much as I love to feast my eyes on the sight, when one 
 knows the snow is not perpetual, seem to impress one very 
 differently to those grand giants whose heads never know the 
 loss of their glorious crowns. However, it was a splendid sight, 
 and worth coming a long way to see. 
 
 My Christmas dinner was excellent, but without plum 
 pudding. 
 
 My heart was lightened by the thought^ that to-day my letter 
 would be a welcome Christmas gifts fif I calculate that my 
 first from Karachi will be received to-day. 
 
 His sister notes here : — 
 
 He never failed to send letters to reach home as nearly as pos- 
 sible on any special days or seasons besides the regular letters. 
 
[40] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 December 31 (on way from Kirmdn to Yezd). — Heavy clouds 
 everywhere, a sea of mud before us and the telegraph posts 
 stretching away into the dim distance, the only signs of civilisa- 
 tion, seeming, too, a link between me and home, inviting me to 
 abandon these desolate places and asking me what was the 
 good of giving up everything that makes life worth living ; and 
 as the prospects of success in the enterprise I have undertaken 
 seem more and more dim, it requires all the resolution I have 
 to continue in the uncomfortable task. 
 
 January 12 (1881). — -As we approached Yezd, a number of 
 riders, some on exceedingly good horses, and with two led horses, 
 gaily caparisoned with bridles covered with gold lace, appeared. 
 Here, I thought, is the Shahzada on his way to Kirmin ; but no, 
 these were people whom the Governor of Yezd had sent out to 
 meet me and welcome me ; they were officers, some in a high 
 position. I had almost forgotten the custom of sending out led 
 horses, and it brought to my mind my previous travels in Persia, 
 for in this country, instead of coming out yourself, you send 
 your best horses in their best clothing. The two chief of these 
 officers were sober, stately gentlemen. Some of the others now 
 went through their games. One man stood on his head on the 
 saddle, and put both legs straight up in the air. Many of them 
 dashed backwards and forwards, and round and round, firing off 
 their rifles. Another dashed off at full gallop, threw his rifle in the 
 air and caught it again, then, dropping the reins on the animal's 
 neck, fired at an imaginary foe. As we neared the city others 
 came to meet me, and when inside a number of farashes 
 (domestic servants) of the Governor joined the procession, now 
 a formidable array. We descended at the door of a magnificent 
 house that had been prepared for us, with an unlimited number 
 of servants and guard ; then the Governor sent to inquire after 
 my health, which he did about every ten minutes ; in the 
 evening he came himself, and his talk was chiefly of sport, of 
 which he seems very fond. He treats me magnificently, feeds 
 niy horses, finds all materials for my food, and sends the Munshi 
 a very fine dinner. I really don't like taking all this, but of 
 course there will be presents to make when I go away, &c. 
 
 . The whole business is very amusing, that, coming into Persia 
 utterly unknown, without a letter, or credentials, or passport of 
 any form or kind, except my own statement that I am an 
 English officer, I should receive such hospitality. The Governor 
 complained that he had done nothing for me, and apologised for 
 not doinff more. 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [41] 
 
 I always feel suspicious when such protestations, almost 
 servile from our point of view, are made. 
 
 January 17. — Persia is like a fiUed-up basin, there is 
 no drainage to the sea, and in the course of many ages the 
 dibris and sand washed down from the mountains have filled 
 up this basin, for nothing can be carried away except by dust 
 storms— thus these everlasting plains have been formed ; they 
 of course get higher and higher, and the mountains get lower. 
 The gaps between these get filled up.^ 
 
 January 19. — Somewhere in the sandy waste we crossed 
 to-day, we passed the boundary of Isfahan and entered the 
 province of Khorasan, the garden of Persia ; but what a garden 
 and what a hopeless country ! — nothing but dreary wastes of salt 
 sand and salt water, with a few salt streams. 
 
 While at Yezd talking with the Governor, a man who was 
 sitting by said he had heard of a prophet having arisen in 
 America, and wanted to know something about it. I told him 
 of the Mormons and Salt Lake City, of Brigham Youiig and his 
 100 wives. I told him the American Government did not 
 approve of all this, but up to now had been unable to put it 
 down ; to which he replied, he hoped that God would help that 
 Government in its attempts. 
 
 January 20. — As usual, there is a marked contrast between 
 this country and China. China is a country that is drained to 
 the sea ; there everything tends to get steeper and steeper, while 
 here everything gets shallower and less steep. The time is of 
 course the time of geological ages, but the effects of the work 
 ■ of time plainly show what is still going on. In China you 
 travel through deep ravines, and the mountain passes are 
 crossed by desperately steep ascents. Here, to cross a 'godar,' 
 as they style them, you ascend a gentle and easy slope, and 
 scarcely Imow when you are at the top. There the summits are 
 like the edge of a knife. 
 
 January 26 (at Sang-gird). — ^We went up the Sir Valley, 
 which in spring or autumn must be delightful — extensive gardens 
 of vines, figs, pomegranates, peaches, apricots, walnuts, and 
 cherries. A stream of real fresh water ripples over a pebbly 
 
 ' During his travels in China, and since, he had often discussed 
 Richthofen's speculations on steppe-formation. I find in a letter of 
 his, dated May 12 (1881) : 'I often used to think of Richthofen's 
 remarks about Central Asia being '' filled up," when travelling through 
 Persia, The latter is regularly a " fiUed-up country "—all filled up, 
 except the tops of the mountains, which stick up out of the sand like 
 rocky inlands out of a sea. ' 
 
[42] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 bed, overhung by plane and walnut trees. At other times we 
 passed rows of mulberry trees. It certainly was a treat to ride 
 through this, after the dreary and desolate wastes to which we 
 have been accustomed ; and I could well appreciate Terrier's 
 ecstasy at Dehrud, which (when we were there eight years ago) 
 we were much disappointed with, because we had been travel- 
 ling in comparatively fertile places. I saw here the first mag- 
 pies to-day that I have seen on this journey. I like. the sight 
 of magpies, they always seem to me homely friendly birds. ' 
 
 January 27. —We marched 37^ miles to Kafglr, thus com- 
 pleting upwards of 1,000 miles from Bandar Abbas. 
 
 January 29 (Mashhad or Meshhed. After meeting different 
 people there he writes) : Now what chance have I in doing in 
 a few days what they have failed in doing in months (speaking 
 of Napier, O'Donovan, and Stewart) .? I might of course manage 
 it if I could stay here some time, but travelling as 1 am, without 
 Government sanction, I cannot possibly overstay my leave, nor 
 even run the risk of it. There is only one course for me to 
 pursue — that is, to get permission from the Minister. It is the 
 
 only way not tried by S . It is altogether a very forlorn 
 
 hope, for I feel certain that the answer to my telegram will be a 
 decided refusal. 
 
 January 30. — My people and horses were glad enough to 
 have finished this march of upwards of 500 miles, in 15 days, 
 for we left Yezd on the 1 5th, and from Yezd to Meshhed is, at my 
 computation, just 505 miles ; and my distances compared with 
 those of Smith from Kirmdn to Yezd, or with those of McGregor 
 from Yezd, and those of Stewart from Yezd, as far as they came 
 my road, are all too short ; so that is not bad marching. 
 
 February 8. — S and I rode out to the Mosque of 
 
 Khdja-Rabbi, about four miles out from the city^— a pretty place 
 with gilt minarets and a garden that would be delightful in 
 spring or summer ; the gardener gave us some violets, but I 
 have come to the conclusion that from one end of Persia to the 
 other there is absolutely nothing worth coming to see, and the 
 way in which people in old days used to talk about the glories 
 and beauties of Persian cities is simply ridiculous. 
 
 February 18 (from Meshhed to Teheran). — ^Average distance 
 (from Meshhed) 68| miles a day. From loth to i8th we came 
 549J miles ; for the first and last days can count as one only — 
 making eight days. 
 
 Very easy going for chappa riding. 
 
 March 2 (in Ghilan). — To-day's ride would be lovely any- 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [43] 
 
 where — through beautiful forests, woods of olives, tumbling 
 streams, green park-like bits ; banks with quantities of violets 
 and primroses in blossom ; picturesque huts, with high thatched 
 roofs ; everything to remind one that we are now in a wet climate. 
 
 March 3. — The climate of Ghilan is rife with a poisonous 
 fever. I was offered hospitality in the kindest way by Monsieur 
 Schwaabe. 
 
 March 24 (on way from Tiflis to Kazbek). — Our things 
 were soon transferred into a sleigh, which easily carried 
 Gerome, myself, and our luggage, and we went off with two 
 horses tandem. The road was very narrow, between walls of 
 snow, sometimes twelve feet high. Under is any depth of snow 
 up to twenty or thirty feet. For the great avalanche that fell 
 the other day came down from a valley and buried nearly the 
 whole of this stage, and in it twelve men were lost.- 
 
 In October of the same year Captain Gill again obtained 
 leave. This time the transactions of the French in Tunis 
 had drawn his attention to North Africa, and it appeared 
 to him that there was great need of detailed knowledge of 
 the provinces between Tunis and Egypt. On his way he 
 made a short tour in Sicily, climbing Etna to the foot of 
 the cone, but hindered by rough weather from completing 
 the ascent. At Malta (October 31) he was joined by a 
 dragoman whom he had summoned, a Syrian from Beyrut, 
 by name Khalil-Atik. This man seems to have won much of 
 his master's regard ; rejoining him on the last fatal expedi- 
 tion, and perishing with him.^ Gill's first experience of the 
 new dragoman's aplomb (to say the least) rather startled him. 
 
 November i. — I gave Khalfl a circular note and told him to 
 ask the landlord if he could change it. He brought me back 
 25 napoleons. 'But,' I said, 'I must sign it.' 'Oh ['replied 
 Khalil, ' I've done that for you.' I made him bring back the 
 note and found he had forged my name with the most complete 
 sang-froid, though hardly in a way my bankers would recognise. 
 
 On November 7 he writes at Tripoli : — 
 Here I am again in my old style, writing iny diary as of old 
 in many a Chinese inn. Of all, I think the one that is brought 
 
 » This faithful servant was the son of Nimja Atik, a, widow in the 
 employment of the Briiish School Mission (Mrs. Bowen Thomson's) 
 at Beyrut. 
 
[44] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 most forcibly to my recollection is one, a day or two beyond 
 Ch'6ng-Tu. It was the hottest night I ever remember, the city 
 was fearfully closed in, the heat and sleepiness were awful, the 
 bugs were plentiful ; though I sat nearly naked, I think I 
 drowned one or two in the perspiration that dropped from me.^ 
 I remember Mesny's wonder, not unmixed with admiration, at 
 my being able to sit down and write. However, recollections 
 crowd upon me, so that if I once begin I shall never leave off. 
 
 His sojourn in Tripoli extended from the first week of 
 November, 1881, to the first week in April following. Three- 
 fifths of this time was wasted in waiting for a permission 
 from Constantinople to travel, which never came, and, after 
 it became necessary to dispense with that, much also in 
 waiting for the execution of promises which never were kept. 
 But Gill brought to bear the same patience and persistence 
 that had carried him through difficulties on the frontier of 
 China, Tibet, and Burma ; several interesting journeys were 
 accomplished, and a large mass of information collected. 
 His first journey was, parallel to the coast, westward to Zuara 
 and Farwa (105 m. from Tripoli) ; a second to Nalut in the 
 hill country, W.S.W. of Tripoli, and thence eastward along 
 the hill country itself to Yifrin, and then N. by E. to Tripoli ; 
 lastly from Tripoli S. into the hill country by Wadi Mijinin, 
 then east to Homs upon the coast, and back along the coast 
 by Lebda to the capital. He had desired to travel by land 
 from Tripoli to Benghazi, and it was in the hope of obtaining 
 an opportunity for this that he waited long in vain. At last^ 
 when this hope failed, he proceeded to Benghazi by steamer, 
 leaving Tripoli April 3. 
 
 I extract a few passages from his journals during his 
 sojourn in Tripoli : — • 
 
 November 26.— Of course a load fell off one of the camels 
 immediately after starting, but that I had naturally looked 
 forward to. KhaHl says he never knew what patience meant 
 before he came here, but he is' rapidly learning it now. All 
 delays come to me now as a matter of course. I take them, like 
 the rain or the sun. 
 
 December 6. — The 'Times' correspondent has been here, 
 
 ' Apparently at Hsin-Chin-Hsien, July 11, 1877. 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JjOHN GILL. [45] 
 
 and spent a week in one of my rooms j he is coming back 
 again next month. I wish / had come out as a special corre- 
 spondent — I could easily have managed it — and then! should 
 have been able to go where I liked ; for they would never dare 
 to incur the displeasure of the great English newspapers. 
 
 December 20. — It is strange — at least it seems so to me — that 
 people whose lives are little better than miserable should set 
 such value on them, while people who have everything they 
 want in this world care nothing at all about their lives. 
 
 The journal abounds in characteristics of Turkish ways 
 and modes of government. 
 
 Under February 4 we find more than one such :— 
 
 There is no telegraph from this to Malta, and telegrams go 
 therefore to Malta by steamer, and thence are wired by an 
 English company. 
 
 It appears that the Ferik (General) here has been sending 
 great numbers of telegrams to Constantinople, but as there is a 
 difficulty about prepayment (for the telegraph company have 
 no agent here) the company, taking into consideration his high 
 position and the fact that his messages were for his Govern- 
 ment, allowed the Ferik to run up a bill. But having run it up 
 he declined to pay it, and as he is to be deposed immediately, 
 he is quite indifferent about the results. The consequence is, 
 that the company now refuse to send any telegrams for the 
 military authorities here, who are thus cut off from all com- 
 munication with Constantinople. 
 
 .... Of one thing I am quite sure from conversation with 
 Khalfl, and that is, that at no very distant day there will be a 
 terrible reckoning for the Turks in Syria, when the Christians 
 in that country, assisted by some outside power (or without 
 such assistance, should the Turks be driven in a war with 
 another Power to withdraw all their troops from Syria;, shall 
 unlock the floodgates of bitter hatred which have been shut for 
 so many years, and let loose the torrent of wild revenge which, 
 having been held back for so long, has been constantly growing 
 and increasing in volume, till now it is ready to sweep in a vast 
 flood over the whole country— revenge for years of insult and 
 oppression— revenge for the death of fathers, mothers, sisters, 
 and brothers— revenge for the deprivation of those liberties 
 which make life worth living— and more than all, revenge for 
 religious persecution. 
 
[46] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 Under March i8 Gill relates the story of John Brown, 
 and how he was hanged by Governor Wise, of Virginia, as 
 it was told him by Colonel Robeson, the American Consul- 
 General at Tripoli. Gill was a boy, I fancy, of thirteen or 
 fpurteen when the thing happened, and was evidently not 
 familiar with the history, which older men remember well. 
 But Colonel Robeson's story had a continuation worth ex- 
 tracting : — 
 
 All this occurred before the war, and Governor Wise was at 
 that time a very wealthy, powerful, and opulent person. After 
 the war he was nearly penniless, and in one of the border states 
 it so happened that Colonel Robeson was in the Quarter- 
 Master-General's office, when a shabby mean-looking person 
 came in and asked for assistance. 'Who are you?' said the 
 Quarter-Master-General. ' I was Governor Wise,' said the 
 stranger ; ' I am absolutely penniless now, and have come to 
 ask you for assistance to help me back to Virginia.' The 
 Quarter-Master-General paused. It was just time for guard- 
 mounting, and during the pause the band marched by the 
 window, playing ' John Brown ! ' It was a mere chance, but a 
 very remarkable one. The Quarter-Master-General gave the 
 late Governor all he could, and sent him on -his way. 
 
 March 24. — Took a ride in the afternoon by myself 
 
 Out at the gate by the seashore, where the rising westerly 
 wind sends little wavelets even here into the sheltered harbour 
 to break on the sandy shore skirting the grim old battlemented 
 wall, we pass with difficulty through a busy crowd. Here are 
 dozens of hucksters with little tables spread selling bread, white, 
 brown, and black. An Arab, wrapt up in a barakan so that he 
 can only see right in front of him, like a horse with blinkers, 
 drives a donkey among my horse's legs. But I know the spot 
 and go cautiously. My horse, fresh with big feeds of barley 
 and little work, puts his ears back and prepares to dance. But 
 I know him too by this time, and I check him just in time to 
 prevent him upsetting half-a-dozen tables. Successfully we 
 thread the intricacies of the crowd, and here, in a wide sandy 
 road between low mud walls that enclose barley-fields, now green 
 and fresh, are hucksters sitting in a row with bundles of lucerne 
 grass and carrots, their donkeys, camels, and horses tethered 
 hard by out of the way, or lying provokingly in the way in the 
 middle of the road. Masaud out of pure joyousness of heart 
 tries to snatch a carrot or a mouthful of corn, and when hin- 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM -JOHN GILL. [47] 
 
 dered looks round reproachfully at me. So we pass the throng 
 on to the quiet road, where a quarter of a mile onward a white 
 mosque with a picturesque minaret stands at the beginning ot 
 the palms. Through these we ride for a couple of miles, the 
 bare rough stems of the trees rising from fields of green barley, 
 glowing red with poppies ; the fig trees and the pomegranates 
 just putting forth their leaves, exulting in the early spring, which 
 here indeed is radiant ; almond trees covered with blossoms 
 rest lovingly against the more sombre olives ; oranges and 
 lemons laden with their golden fruit would tempt the passer-by 
 to pluck one here and there were they not so common, and the 
 
 air is laden with the scent of the orange flowers, &c 
 
 And as the sun sets we again pass through the gates with a 
 fervent prayer that this may be the last time, and that the 
 steamer may come to-morrow. Then to the stables, where we 
 see our horses fed, and sit for half-an-hour with old Taylor, 
 while his tongue runs on continually, as we silently smoke a 
 cigarette, and so home to the solitary dinner ! 
 
 Benghazi was reached by steamer on April 6. It was 
 reached a la Turc, however, from the easHvard, the Captain 
 having overshot the mark some 50 miles in the night. Gill 
 was told after landing that a Turkish steamer expected from 
 the west always appeared from the east and vice versd. 
 
 He writes under date April 8, in a letter to a friend : — 
 
 The vessel belongs partly to a company, but I don't exactly 
 know the ins and outs. She used to be commanded by an 
 Austrian, but recently the government have put Turkish naval 
 officers into her, as part of their policy of exciting all Mussul- 
 mans against all Christians. That this is their policy now I 
 am certain ; I have no doubt that the Egyptian troubles are a 
 part of it ; and it is a fact that the officers of the Turkish army 
 have been ordered to associate as little as possible with Chris- 
 tians. * * * The officers of the ship were fortunately exceed- 
 ingly polite and good natured (as Turks always are) and allowed 
 the three first-class passengers to use the bridge. One of them 
 was a young Italian, who belongs to a pseudo-geographico- 
 scientifico-meteorologico-commercial society. This society has 
 a station at Benghazi, and another at Derna ; but heaven 
 knows what they do, unless you omit all the other o's, and 
 substitute ' politico.' 
 
[48] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 One of his objects was to travel from Benghazi through 
 the Cyrenaica by land to Egypt. Having failed to obtain 
 any Turkish permission to travel, but understanding that 
 the Vah would not make any opposition to his going without 
 leave, he made a start at night (April 21), having first sent 
 most of his things out of the town to a garden-house two 
 miles distant. But the last despatch of luggage was inter- 
 cepted by an officious Zaptieh ; a party were sent after 
 them ; they were turned back, and his camel-men, &c., were 
 thrown into prison. 
 
 It was a costly and vexatious failure, and Gill felt it 
 much. He writes on April 26 : — 
 
 Alas, alas ! spilt milk, spilt milk, in huge cans full ! It's no 
 use crying over it, but it's uncommonly hard to help it. 
 
 .... Though Tripoli is badly governed, this Vilayat is 
 infinitely worse. The present Vali was at one time Pasha at 
 
 Tripoli, but D H got him kicked out, after a reign of 
 
 forty days only, for indulging too openly in the traffic of slaves. 
 Here he can do this with' less trouble, for although the people 
 in England may not know it, the slave-trade flourishes exceed- 
 ingly. ... He was once turned out of this place also. He 
 went away with a large retinue of slaves in a steamer, touching 
 at Crete. The Consul here managed to apprise the Consul at 
 Crete of the affair ; the latter boarded the ship, but all the 
 Slaves were found with passports, arid . declared themselves free 
 and willing servants of the Pasha, who, partly by threats, and 
 partly by telling them the foreigners would come and make 
 them Christians by force, had made them deny their slavery. 
 Of course, directly they left Crete, the passports were taken 
 away and burnt. 
 
 On May 8, he left Benghazi by steamer for Malta ; and 
 thence on the isth for Catania, where he caught the steamer 
 for Constantinople. I believe his efforts to obtain any re- 
 dress, or the release of his men arrested at Benghazi, were 
 unsuccessful. He started from Constantinople by rail on 
 May 29. I give a few more extracts : — 
 
 May 29.— I think there was a little mahce mixed up in my 
 determination to travel without a teskere, that is, without leave ; 
 
 for the Ambassador wigged me so sevei-ely (in S 's presence) 
 
 for travelling without leave in Tripoli, that I confess I take some 
 
CAPTAIN W. J. GILL, 
 WITH THE COMPANIONS OF HIS JOURNEYS IN TRIPOLI. 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [49] 
 
 pleasure in doing the same thing here, with the knowledge of 
 the Ambassador himself, and by the advice of his private 
 secretary (S^ ). 
 
 . . . This man (X ) got a contract for the railway from 
 
 Constantinople to and onwards through the mountains, 
 
 and he arranged it so as to be paid at so much a kilometre, the 
 same price per kilometre in the mountains as in the plains, a 
 sort of medium rate having been chosen ; accordingly he set to 
 work and made the line in the plain as long as he could, wind- 
 ing about instead of going straight, for in the plains where the 
 line costs much less per mile than he was paid by his contract, 
 the longer he could make it the better for himself. Then as 
 soon as he reached the mountains' he employed agents who 
 went to the Minister of Public Works, and by his (X 's) in- 
 structions abused it, pointed out that the line had purposely 
 been made longer than necessary, and advised the Minister to 
 break the concession. The Minister fell into the trap, and 
 
 wanted to break off the engagement. X pretended to be 
 
 angry and demanded compensation, which was given him by 
 allowing him to cut, in perpetuity apparently, as much timber 
 
 as he liked in the Forest of Y , but which in the somewhat 
 
 curious wording of the concession he was to XxeaX en ban pire 
 defamille. . . . Thus have the wretched Turks been spoiled by 
 the Christian entrepreneurs. Of course it is their own fault, as 
 they will do nothing without bribes, and thus respectable men 
 are driven away. 
 
 May 30 (at Philippopolis). — The German (agent of a water 
 company) made one very significant remark. He said, ' Every- 
 thing is safe here, that is why my company comes here. We 
 know that if we get our concession our money will be paid 
 regularly, and that our investment is a safe one ; whereas in 
 Turkey everything is different and nothing is secure.' 
 
 He reached Ldndon on June 16. On the 21st of the 
 following month he was again on the move ; starting on 
 what was to be his last expedition. He was directed to 
 proceed to Egypt on special service, with rank as Deputy- 
 Assistant-Adjutant- General and Deputy-Assistant-Quarter- 
 Master-General. I had no opportunity of personally wishing 
 him God-speed, being out of town at the moment, but I 
 may be forgiven if I transcribe here the words, now so 
 greatly valued, in which he told me of the orders : — 
 
[50] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 I Edinburgh Mansions, 20-7. 
 Just one line to wish my kindest friend good-bye. I received 
 orders last night to start to-morrow for Alexandria. The very 
 short peeps I have had of you have been the pleasantest half- 
 hours of my short stay at home. 
 
 The circumstances of Captain Gill's deputation to Egypt 
 were first publicly stated in a speech delivered by Lord 
 Northbrook at the Royal Geographical Society on Novem- 
 ber 13, 1882. Gill had been employed, under Lord North- 
 brook's instructions, in association with Colonel Bradford, a 
 distinguished officer of the Indian service, in collecting inform- 
 ation as to the Bedouin tribes adjoining the Canal. Such 
 an inquiry soon brought them into communication with Pro- 
 fessor E. H. Palmer as the person best able to assist them, 
 and before long it led to the despatch of Professor Palmer to 
 the desert.^ Lord Northbrook, seeing Gill's character and 
 value, proposed to send him also out to join Admiral 
 Hoskins at Port Said as an officer of the Intelligence De- 
 partment. The charge of cutting the telegraph wire from 
 Cairo, which crossed the Desert to El-Arish and Syria, and 
 so to Constantinople, by which Ardbi (in rebellion against 
 the Porte !) obtained information and support from that 
 capital, eventually devolved on him. 
 
 More than once indications have been manifested of a 
 supposition that Gill's despatch on this last fatal expedition 
 had originated somehow on his own motion. There was no 
 ground for this idea except the voluntary character of some 
 of his former journeys, in which, though travelling at his own 
 cost, he procured information of great public value ; and it 
 is quite dispelled by the following passages (over which one 
 might fancy some presentiment to hover), gathered from the 
 torn and stained fragments of diary which were recovered 
 from the surface of the Desert many weeks after his death, 
 and pieced together by his sister's pious care : — 
 
 Wednesday, July 19. — » * East, who told me I was to go 
 to-morrow to Egypt. Found a memo, from Sir Garnet Wolseley 
 to that effect when I got home. Two lines only * » » 
 
 * Professor Palmer left London June 30 ; left Jaffa July 12 ; left 
 Gn/.i for Suez through the Desert about July 14. 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [51] 
 
 Ftiday, 21st. — « * I have this consolation, that whatever 
 happens I never asked any one to send me, or to let me go to 
 Egypt. When G. Wolseley * * to go, I was quite prepared, 
 until Lord [Northbrook] expressly sent for me, and asked me to 
 go to Admiral Hoskins. Personally I would rather have been 
 with [ ♦ ♦ Wolseley (?)] * but now whatever turns up I shall 
 feel that I have simply done what I was told. 
 
 On another torn scrap, on which no date remains, but 
 which seems to have been written at this time, we find these 
 touching and suggestive words: — 
 
 * » chance for which * * come at last. I do I have spent 
 my life * * the earth in search of information * * by way of 
 fitting myself for active \se7vice\ » * but the latter I have 
 always missed by ill-luck. 
 
 I volunteered for Abyssinia when a boy » * 
 
 He reached Alexandria on July 27, and next day pro- 
 ceeded to Port Said in the ' Decoy ' to report himself to 
 Admiral Hoskins. Here he became an official guest of 
 Captain Dennistoun of the ' Tourmaline ' till August 5, when 
 he left for Suez, arriving there on the 6th at 4 a.m. 
 
 Before going further I will here cite a few passages from 
 the last pages of his journal.' 
 
 July 27 (Alexandria). — There is not much to say about the 
 streets of Alexandria. Some of them are in hideous ruins, 
 others fairly intact, but the impression of driving down a street 
 which is not ruined is almost more melancholy than driving in 
 one that is, because all the houses and shops are shut up, the 
 streets are quite deserted, and the place has the appearance of 
 a city of the dead ; it almost puts one in mind of Pompeii. 
 
 July 29 (Port Said).— Met B., 'Standard' correspondent, 
 to-day. Met him at dinner about three weeks ago at Sir Oliver 
 St. John's. How one does meet people one has met elsewhere ! 
 Wandering about the world one meets a certain lot of people 
 that one meets everywhere else out of England. It always 
 
 » Some fragments of the diary retained by himself were picked up, 
 as already mentioned, in the Desert, and a few additional extracts from 
 these (sometimes deciphered with difficulty) are introduced further on. 
 The remainder, and much the larger part, are taken from the somewhat 
 fuller and more explanatory journal which he transmitted to his mother 
 from Suez before the fatal start of August 8. 
 
[52] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 seems to me that I know more people in every foreign capital 
 than I do in London. This is not, of course, really the case, 
 but it is true that abroad I am certain to stumble casually on 
 lots of people I know— that in foreign places I always find an 
 entrie at once into the whole society, so that I know everyone 
 in a very short time — while, at home, London is so immense, 
 that though one keeps on increasing one's acquaintance, there 
 are always hundreds, not to say thousands, of whom one knows 
 nothing. 
 
 August I. — The position of affairs here is most extra- 
 ordinary ; we are living nominally and apparently at peace with 
 everyone — no mihtary precautions are anywhere taken — no 
 preparations made, and yet we are at war. We cannot buy a 
 camel, nor a sheep, nor a donkey, nor a sack of straw, because 
 we have no place to put anything in. We cannot collect 
 animals at Suez until we take it. The same is the case at 
 Ismailia. Thus we are apparently friendly with everyone, and 
 liable at the same time to have the water cut off at any moment ; 
 we cannot even begin to get into relations with the Arab 
 Sheikhs, who, in the meantime, are gradually going over to 
 Arabi. 
 
 During his stay at Port Said, he wrote a memorandum 
 to the Admiral (now before me) ' On the Position of Affairs at 
 Port Said and Ismailia,' but his chief occupation seems to 
 have been making arrangements for a supply of fresh water, 
 in case the existing supply should be -cut off, which was 
 threatened. In this he was associated with Captain Seynaour 
 of the ' Iris.' On the 3rd, he writes : — 
 
 Saw a man named D — -, an Englishman, an engineer, 
 who has the ice factory here. He is employed by us to buy from 
 the Canal Company six steam tugs, old and useless for their 
 proper purpose. ... If he gets them we can turn them into 
 condensers, condensing 200 tons a day. We then propose to 
 moor two or three big iron lighters in the corner of the Com"- 
 mercial Basin — holding about sixty tons between them — and to 
 moor the ' N. Briton ' (refugee ship) close by ; to make her small 
 engines of use for condensing, and her tanks for storage, and to 
 keep the iron lighters always full of water. The people can then 
 come and get what they want out of the lighter. 
 
 Friday, August 4. — On board the ' Penelope ; ' learnt that 
 the Admiral had gone to Ismailia last night about 10. He has 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [53] 
 
 not seen my memo, on Palmer's report, which has gone 
 straight to Beauchamp Seymour. It does not matter except 
 that I should have asked Hoskins whether he had the money 
 for Palmer, before writing the memo., if I had known it would 
 go straight to B. S. ;^2S,cioo will, according to Palmer, buy 
 over 50,000 Arabs on the east of the Canal. I intend to 
 urge that this money should be straightway sent down to him 
 at Suez. ... I hear that most of the policemen here will join 
 our side when the time comes, and carry on the ordinary and 
 usual police work. This will be a great blessing, and saving 
 of difficulties, though it will offend the European population. 
 The Europeans at Alexandria are furious that we employ the 
 native policemen, and write as if we were the lords and 
 masters of Egypt already. It is the continually employing 
 Europeans instead of natives which has been the root of all 
 the evils in Egypt, and now this miserable European population 
 howl because we don't exercise a most arbitrary authority, to 
 which we have no right whatever, and turn out the police of the 
 Khedive. 
 
 . . . , the correspondent, went to Suez to-day — a 
 
 good riddance, for it is a nuisance to have a man always 
 pumping you. I wish I had known it in time enough to write 
 
 to Palmer, and warn him to keep out of his way ! ... X 
 
 here amused me the other day. I was talking about the water 
 being cut off, and he said : 'Ah, it really does not matter to 
 me if they cut it off, for I always drink soda-water.' I 
 mentally added, ' with plenty of B.' 
 
 From this forward I print the journal entire, omitting 
 only some statements as to speed, &c., of the boat that 
 carried him to Suez. 
 
 August 5. — Got a message from the Admiral that he 
 wanted to see me, and found that he had received orders to 
 cut the telegraph wire between Kantara and El-Arish.* This 
 is to be done without breaking the neutrality of the Suez Canal, 
 so we cannot simply pick up the cable where it crosses the 
 Canal, and take it away, nor can we land at Kantara. 
 
 To land at or near El-Arish would be very risky, unless we 
 were in communication with the Bedouins near. 
 
 So I decided to go and consult — — and Palmer. 
 
 I was given a picket boat, which is a large steam-launch 
 
 • Kantara is on the Suez Canal, and El-Arish on the Mediterranean 
 coast, nearly one hundred miles east of Port Said. 
 
[54] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 supposed to go 12 knots, but in fact not averaging more than 
 9^. There was a Lieut. Grove and a middy with me, and we 
 took a pilot. We left at 3h. 2om. . . . Between the nineteenth 
 and twentieth mile-posts saw people working on the western 
 bank. It did not look like fortifying the place, but fresh earth 
 was being thrown over the bank. I could not make out what 
 they were doing, but I was too low doWn to see. 
 
 We arrived alongside the ' Orion ' at Ismailia at about 8 p.m. 
 The senior officer, Captain Fitzroy, was not on his ship, but 
 was dining with Stevenson on the ' Carysfort,' and thither I 
 went. Found them half through dinner ; they gave me to 
 
 eat, and then, having sent for we discussed matters. 
 
 was of opinion that we could not depend on landing 
 
 near El-Arish, which was also my very strong opinion. He 
 wants himself to go to Gaza, where he says he knows the 
 Governor. ... I did not think the proposal hopeful, but did 
 not say so. Fitzroy told me that there were 3,000 men at 
 Nifish, with their front facing the Canal to Ismailia, their right 
 resting on the railway station, and their left towards the desert 
 on the north ; and that the railway bridge to Suez over the 
 Freshwater Canal, on their extreme right, was still intact ; 
 four guns were counted, and horses were seen. This morn- 
 ing two battalions were seen at drill, and this evening a 
 larger number. There was a picket in the Arab town of 
 Ismailia, and Lesseps himself was stopped by this picket. 
 There is also constant communication between Nifish and 
 Ismailia. 
 
 The old Governor of Ismailia, Gaver Bey, being afraid of 
 Ardbi, is on board one of the English men-of-war. The new 
 Governor is Ari' Effendi Zulf Agha, or some such name. He 
 was some years ago cashier in the Custom House at Alexandria. 
 
 knows him and thinks he could buy him, but he thinks 
 
 that of everybody ! 
 
 After about an hour we went on again. I slept a good deal 
 between 10 and 2. After this we met another man-of-war 
 launch, in which was Helsham Jones, going up to Ismailia to 
 have a look round. 
 
 We reached the flag-ship of Sir W. Hewett, V.C, K.C.B., 
 at about 4 A.M. Stopped here to take in water, and then went 
 ashore, as Hewett is living at the Suez Hotel. 
 
 We had been carrying 20,000/. in gold, and I was not sorry 
 to get rid of it. There was scarcely anyone on board the flag- 
 ship besides the first lieutenant, who gave us sailors' coffee. I 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [55] 
 
 do think the coffee you get on a man-of-war for nastiness beats 
 even that on board a P. and O." 
 
 All the sailors are landed, as there was a scare the other 
 night — last night, I think — which ended in nothing. It turns 
 out that the water is not cut off from Suez. 
 
 Sunday, August 6. — Found Hewett at the hotel ; also 
 Tanner, who was my fellow-passenger from London to Alexan- 
 dria. Saw Palmer also. He is the professor of Arabic at Cam- 
 bridge, and has travelled much in the Sinaitic Peninsula, and 
 knows all the Arab Sheikhs. He has just come from among 
 them, and is hopeful of buying about 50,000 over to us for 
 about 25,000/. Had a long talk with him and determined to 
 go and cut the wire myself; this will help to show me how 
 far Palmer's rather hopeful opinions are true. Palmer has 
 arranged for a great meeting of Sheikhs in a few days, and 
 if he were to go north to cut the cable he would miss this 
 meeting, which might do incalculable injury. There is no 
 one here to send except military and naval officers, who have 
 never travelled among this sort of people ; and for every reason 
 it is best for me to go. 
 
 .... I brought Palmer down authority to spend 20,000/. 
 amongst the Bedouins.^ 
 
 We are in a very curious position now, but I do not think 
 that Ardbi will break the neutrality of the Canal as long as we 
 don't ; and as all Europe is against any one doing anything to 
 affect its neutrality, I don't suppose our Government will dare 
 to do it, so that we shall probably have to march on Cairo from 
 Suez direct, and, without using the fertile and well-watered 
 waadi, we shall have to go straight across the Desert. Then I 
 believe we shall find ourselves at war with Turkey, if not with 
 Russia also, and several of the other Powers. 
 
 Of course I had to set to work to buy an outfit, Arab clothes, 
 pillows, cooking-pots, meat, flour, &c. &c. Then I got hold of 
 Lieut. Brant, gunnery lieutenant, and got from him all the 
 things necessary, gun-cotton, Bickford's fuse, detonators, axes, 
 
 ' Captain Gill was mistaken in supposing, as he appears to have 
 done (or, at any rate, as has been concluded from this passage in 
 connection with a preceding paragraph), that the money which Lieutenant 
 Grove., R.N. , brought down in the picket-boat in which Gill travelled 
 was an advance for Palmer. It was for the Admiral's chest, and to 
 meet all demands thereon that might arise (inclusive doubtless of any 
 advances to Palmer that might be authorised). See Lord Northbrook's 
 statements in the House of Lords, March 16, 1883. See also Mr. 
 Besant's Memoir of Palmer, p. 301. 
 
£56] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 &c., and am ready now to destroy one of the greatest works of 
 civilisation — a telegraph line. Suez is not altogether or by any 
 means deserted ; still it is empty. War is always melancholy 
 to me. The sad side of it always forces itself on my attention 
 somehow. The newspaper correspondent, who lives in an 
 atmosphere of gunpowder, and does not know what it is to 
 travel in an uncivilised country in a state of profound peace, 
 does not feel it like one who has travelled about a good deal 
 and lived amongst a poor and uncivilised people in a state of 
 peace. 
 
 Many laughable , incidents occurred at the capture of Suez. 
 Colonel Tanner, with a dozen marines, trying to catch the train, 
 in which the Governor was being carried off, and Arabi's 
 soldiers looking at them out of window. How Palmer im- 
 pressed Captain C (the oldest resident Englishman's) 
 
 favourite donkey, on which Helsham Jones mounted, tumbled 
 
 into the Freshwater Canal, and spoilt the saddle. C does 
 
 not see the point of the landing now, at all ! How the only 
 two soldiers who stopped behind did not like giving up their 
 arms. Poor fellows ! I believe there was something good about 
 those two ! They stayed behind, and they almost cried when 
 they had their rifles taken from them. 
 
 I went out to the Camp, as it is -now called — Victoria 
 Hospital it was in 1869, when Dick Roberts lived there, with 
 whom I spent a day. Suez was quite a gay place in those days. 
 The table d'h6te o!f this hotel was always crowded, and there 
 were plenty of ladies. My next visit here was on returning 
 from China, and the Drummonds were here too. 
 
 My watch has come to grief. I usually travel with 
 
 about half-a-dozen timepieces altogether ; hitherto my watch 
 has never stopped. For the first time I believe in all my travels 
 I have only one watch ; now something has gone wrong with 
 the catch of the winding gear, and it won't wind up. 
 
 These words are the last in WiUiam Gill's journal sent 
 home, as his habit was, to his mother and sister. One of 
 the torn and partly obliterated fragments picked up in the 
 Desert by Sir Charles Warren goes further : — 
 
 Monday, August 7.— The Admiral would not let us start to- 
 day, and indeed it won't make much delay, for Palmer is expect- 
 ing Emtaiyarr, chief of the Hawet4t.« If we miss him it will 
 
 « This is the man better known as Meter Abu Sofiah, on whose 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [57] 
 
 delay us, as he has all the country close to Suez. A steam- 
 launch went up to-day to reconnoitre. I went with it. Char- 
 rington, the flag-lieutenant of the Admiral, was with us, and a 
 
 middy of course (Gore Brown). Gordon, of the (an officer 
 
 waiting for his regiment), came too. . . . Helsham Jones rode 
 out with a naval officer ; he also saw them, but being on the 
 Cairo side of the Canal, they levelled their rifles at him. This 
 shows that Arabi will respect the Canal as long as we do. Our 
 party came from Canal, or Canal land, and his soldiers did not 
 notice us. Jones came on the other side, or land not belonging 
 to Canal, and he was threatened. 
 
 In the evening Emtaiyarr arrived, much to our relief. This 
 man has never seen a house before. Arabi has sent to him 
 many times, and he has always refused to go ; but a word from 
 Palmer brought him in. The Admiral gave him a sword. He 
 was immensely proud. 
 
 Tuesday, August 8. — A ship arrived with the late 72ftd this 
 morning. 
 
 These are his last written words. 
 
 Professor Palmer had reached Suez on August i, after that 
 venturesome journey from Gaza, described in Mr. Besant's 
 biography of his friend, in the chapter entitled ' The Great 
 Ride of the Sheikh Abdulla.' On his way he had met Mislah, 
 the Sheikh of the Teyahah Bedouins, who introduced him 
 to Meter Abu Sofiah already mentioned, as the head Sheikh 
 of the Lehewat, occupying all the country east of Suez. 
 
 According to Sir Charles Warren's report, both statements 
 were deceptions. Meter Abu Sofiah was not a Sheikh of 
 the Lehewat, and that tribe does not occupy the position 
 alleged. And it was principally, he considers, owing to 
 the difficulties arising from these deceptions that Palmer 
 and his companions fell into the hands of the Bedouins 
 who murdered them. 
 
 Professor Palmer had made arrangements for certain 
 Sheikhs of the Desert tribes to meet him on the 12th, at 
 Nakhl, which is a fort in the Desert about half-way between 
 Suez and Akaba And at his request Lieutenant Harold 
 Charrington, Admiral Hewett's flag-lieutenant, was to ac- 
 
 duplicity and avarice the chief blame of the catastrophe seems to rest. 
 His tribe is called Lehewat. 
 
[58] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 company him as a guarantee to the chiefs that Palmer 
 was acting on the part of the Queen's Government. Palmer 
 took with him 3,000/. in sovereigns, received from the 
 ' Euryalus.' And this, there is no just ground for question- 
 ing, was intended mainly to procure camels ; though there 
 is no need to ignore the perfectly legitimate object of the 
 expedition, which was the chief duty which Palmer had taken 
 upon him, viz. to secure the adhesion of the sheikhs. 
 
 Gill, it would appear, arranged to keep them company, and 
 afterwards to proceed to destroy the wire. The party, consist- 
 ing of the three English gentlemen, with Gill's dragoman, 
 Khalil Atik, Palmer's cook (a Hebrew, Bpkhor Hassfln), Meter 
 Abu Soflah and his nephew, left Suez, in Arab clothing, on 
 the 8th for the Well of Moses, where they picked up camels 
 and camelmen. They started from the Wells next morning. 
 Admiral Hewett does not appear to have expected to hear from 
 them before the i8th. Even some days before this date dis- 
 quieting rumours began to spread, but no serious alarm was 
 taken, and on the 27th Admiral Hoskins reported that Gill was 
 stated to be safe, and was expected to reach Suez the day after. 
 
 This report appears to be connected with what was heard 
 
 and repeated by Mr. , who had been sent about the 
 
 middle of August to Gaza. His people brought him news 
 that Gill had been at an encampment of the Terabin Arabs 
 in that neighbourhood recently, and had started for Suez ; ^ 
 
 a mystification which has not been explained. But 
 
 also heard a rumour that two white men had been murdered. 
 
 In England, though much reticence was observed, just 
 anxiety seems to have been awakened at the Admiralty, 
 earlier than at Suez ; and Colonel (now Sir Charles) Warren, 
 R.E., whose experience and qualifications for dealing with 
 an inquiry among Arabs were estimated highly, and not 
 more highly than the result has shown that they deserved, 
 was sent out in the end of August to advise and assist 
 
 ' These lines are part of the original memoir as printed in the 
 Royal Engineers' Journal for December 1882. They are quite corrobo- 
 rated by Colonel Warren's letter to Lord Alcester da'ed February 16, 
 1883, and published in the ' Supplementary Correspondence' presented 
 to Parliament. 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [59] 
 
 Admiral Hewett in this matter. Warren proceeded to Tor, 
 and at a later date to Akaba, by steamer. He found the Arabs 
 at both places singularly indisposed to enter into any com- 
 munication ; but up to the end of September, and even later, 
 he did not despair of the travellers being still ahve, and it was 
 not till October 20 that he could report the story of their 
 having been attacked on August 10, and put to death. 
 
 Four days later (October 24) Colonel Warren was on 
 the scene of the murder, and all doubt was at an end. 
 
 I shall not dwell on the complex and painful details of 
 the last scenes. All that could be derived from a compari- 
 son of the evidence and confessions has been detailed by 
 Colonel Warren in his letter to the Admiralty of April 10 
 ('Supp. Corres.' pp. 24, seqq.\ and reprinted by Mr. Besant 
 in his Life of Palmer. On the night of the 9th the party 
 encamped at Wadi Kahalin (which I do not find on any 
 map, but which must he somewhat less than 30 miles S.S.E. 
 of Suez). Here they were detained a great part of the next 
 day by the search for two camels that had been stolen 
 during the night, and they did not quit the ground until 
 3 P.M. After midnight, at a place called. Maharib, in Widi 
 Sadr,' they were attacked and fired on by Bedouins in 
 ambuscade, some twenty-five in number. Nothing certain 
 is known of what passed in the capture, but it is probable 
 (says Colonel Warren) that the Bedouins, finding they were 
 so few in number, rushed in upon them and disarmed them. 
 Meter Abu Sof5ah had escaped to his own camp, and on the 
 I ith brought down a few of his tribesmen, ostensibly for 
 the rescue of the travellers. He found them stripped but 
 unguarded, and at this time an escape seems to have been 
 possible, had the guide been true. But the enemy returned ; 
 Abu Sofiah went through some attempt, or pretext, of nego- 
 tiation for ransom, which was rejected, and they were left 
 to their fates ; ' it being understood by the Meter and those 
 who accompanied him that the party were to be killed.' 
 They were driven, stripped to their shirts and bareheaded, 
 
 • This has generally been written Wady Stidr; but I gather that the 
 vowel is the fatha or short &, and the name in systematic spelling 
 would be written Sadr, possibly Sadr. 
 
[6o] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 under an August sun, to a ravine in the Wadi Sadr, and 
 there the murder was accomplished. 
 
 They died, let it be distinctly said, honourably engaged 
 in their country's service. But whether the murder was 
 the act of greedy ruffians, or was ordered from a distance, 
 we see as yet no absolutely clear ground for judgment. 
 Indeed, Sir Charles Warren himself, though tending to the 
 former view, evidently has doubts. I incline to the other, 
 and to assent to all the grounds for doubt in that direction, 
 which are so well stated by Mr. Besant.^ Indeed, cold- 
 blooded murder of this kind is not usual with Bedouins. 
 
 A question which has frequently been asked is why 
 Admiral Hewett allowed the party to go on such an expedi- 
 tion, and with such a sum of money, without escort ? I beheve 
 that there were no means of supplying escort, and that the 
 question therefore for Sir W. Hewett's decision really was, 
 whether in such circumstances the party was to go without 
 escort or not to go at all. Palmer certainly impressed him 
 with the view that there was no serious danger. The real 
 danger, which almost certainly produced the catastrophe — 
 that is, the agency of the Shedid Sheikhs at Cairo in stirring 
 up Bedouins in their allegiance — seems not to have been 
 present to any one's mind. It will also be seen from Warren's 
 letter (in the ' Supp. Corres.' p. i6) that Palmer had written 
 on the 4th to Meter Abu Soflah desiring him to come to 
 Moses' Wells with twenty armed men to escort him to Nakhl. 
 We do not know whether Palmer had agreed with Abu Soflah 
 to dispense with these, or, on finding that they were not forth- 
 coming, still decided to go on, in order to keep the appoint- 
 ment at Nakhl, trusting to the safeguard of Abu Soflah. 
 
 The tragedy occurred on August ii, apparently in the 
 afternoon. 
 
 Colonel Warren, when he reached the scene more than 
 ten weeks later (October 24), collected the very scanty 
 rehcs of the victims and of their clothing, &c. He then 
 proceeded to Nakhl, where he succeeded, without resist- 
 ance, in instaUing the new Governor who had accompanied 
 him from Suez. The old Governor was arrested. 
 
 ' Life of E. H. Palmer, pp. 320, seqq. 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [6i] 
 
 Meter Abu Soflah on November 6 gave himself up to 
 Captain Stephenson, R.N., at Suez. He was examined by 
 Colonel Warren, but died in the native hospital at Suez, 
 January 6, so that he never was tried. 
 
 By the extraordinary and prolonged exertions of Colonel 
 Warren, involving not only much hardship and considerable 
 danger, but the exercise of great tact, judgment, and patience, 
 the story was traced out, evidence collected, and the 
 majority' of the chief participators in the crime brought to 
 justice. These were tried in his presence by the Egyptian 
 commission at Tantah, February 6 to 14, and five of 
 the principal culprits condemned to death ; eight others 
 (including the ex-governor of Nakhl) to various terms of 
 imprisonment ; capital sentence being also pronounced 
 against five who were still at large. The execution was 
 carried out at Zagazig on March i. 
 
 The three victims of this memorable calamity might all 
 be called young men, and full of promise, but two of them 
 were also men who had given such proofs of their great 
 qualities, 'that their loss might have dimmed a victory.'' 
 They will not, I trust, be forgotten by the country for whose 
 service they gave their lives. And in regard to this subject, 
 I venture to quote here words of my own used at the Royal 
 Geographical Society on November 13 — words which also 
 give briefly my impression of my friend's character : — 
 
 .... What a singular Nemesis has brooded over the fate 
 of those travellers who were the earliest in our day to take part 
 in rending the veil which hung over these Indo-Chinese frontier 
 lands ! Francis Gamier, Cooper, Margary, and now poor Gill 
 — all perishing by violence. Three of the four I knew ; two of 
 these, Gamier and Gill, did me the honour to call me friend. 
 
 It was surely, my Lord, a sad and strange lot that fell to me, 
 under Providence, twice within ten days last month, to be called 
 on, through no action of my own, to furnish notices to the public 
 press of the careers of friends of mine, each eminent for what 
 he had accomplished — both still greater in promise for the 
 future — and each of them young enough to have been my son ! 
 — one, Arthur Burnell, a scholar, and a ripe and good one^ the 
 
 ' Words of Lord Dalhousie, in a G. O., regarding the murder of 
 Colonel Mackeson at Peshawar in 1853. 
 
[62] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 most eminent scholar, indeed, on the lists of the modern Indian 
 Services ; a man of many high qualities, but eminently a man 
 of books. The other, William Gill, a man to whom action — 
 action — action — was everything ; reserved, often taciturn in 
 company, but having beneath that undemonstrative exterior a 
 soul of fire ! 
 
 Look at his constant eagerness to devote himself to useful < 
 enterprise ; to take on himself any amount of toil ; to face any 
 amount of danger and hardship— and, still harder to bear, any 
 amount of weary waiting, and the monotony of temporary 
 failure, when his country seemed to need it at his hands ; and 
 all this at his own charges — literally spending and spent in the 
 public service. 
 
 Lately, by favour of his family, a vast mass of his journals, 
 which he kept in great detail, and regularly forwarded for his 
 mother's perusal (for he was a good son as well as a good 
 servant of his country), have passed under my eye. Reviewing 
 through these his brief career, and the vast amount of toilsome 
 enterprise crowded into it, it seems to me that his ardent and 
 loyal soul had wrested from the enemy the pet adage of treason, 
 and bound as a cognisance round his gallant brow, ' England s 
 necessity is my opportunity^ 
 
 Let me, before I sit down, add a word more regarding this 
 good soldier and his companions. It was no common occasion 
 on which they were sent forth into the Desert of the Wander- 
 ings, from which their footsteps were never to emerge ; it was by 
 no common tragedy that their bright career was quenched ; they 
 were no common men ! Let England show that she feels it ! 
 
 In one of those journals of which I have spoken, to which 
 my friend used to commit his thoughts in his wanderings, he 
 one day wrote thus : — 
 
 ' I have been considering what I should give as the defini- 
 tion of a Great Power, and I have come to the conclusion that 
 a Great Power is one which can best protect its subjects where- 
 ever they may be.' 
 
 It must needs be that disasters should sometimes come. 
 England cannot everywhere anticipate them. But when they 
 come from crime and treachery, surely, in spite of all that is 
 come and gone, England may still say with truth, ' Woe to him 
 from whom they come ! ' And she will, we may gather from a 
 late reply of Mr. Gladstone's, make provision for those of the 
 families left behind who may require such provision. But more 
 than that ! She is bound to see that, if their mortal part lay 
 
CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN GILL. [63] 
 
 for weeks and months dishonoured and bleaching beneath the 
 desert sun, at least no honour shall now be grudged to their 
 memory, but that a tablet in St. Paul's or Westminster shall 
 commemorate their names, their career, and their common fate. 
 But yet again. My Lord Aberdare, you referred in your 
 Address to those thousands of rock-inscriptions on Sinai, which 
 Palmer had interpreted. I would fain see another rock-inscrip- 
 tion added ! I would fain see that, aloft on that fatal cliff in 
 Paran, a panel should be hewn, and on it cut, large and deep, so 
 as to show black in the mid-day sun, and to be legible for miles 
 across the waste, such words as these : ' Go, Traveller, and tell 
 in England that we three died here in obedience to her behests? 
 
 The desire expressed in the foregoing sentences for the 
 erection of some public memorial in honour of these three 
 gallant gentlemen is now, thanks to the generous zeal with 
 which the object has been promoted by Lord Northbrook, 
 in process of fulfilment. The scanty relics of the murdered 
 men collected by Colonel Warren were solemnly interred in 
 the crypt of St. Paul's on April 6, 1883, in presence of Lord 
 Northbrook and many friends of the deceased, including a 
 great many officers of Engineers. A granite slab marked 
 with their initials and ages will cover the tomb, , whilst a 
 brass tablet on the wall will briefly record the circumstances. 
 And arrangements, I understand, are being made to cut an 
 inscription on the rocks in Widi Sadr.^ 
 
 I would, with entire adoption, add to what has been said 
 a few words written to me, when the positive news of 
 Gill's fate was received, by his friend and mine, Mr. Edward 
 Colbome Baber : — ■ 
 
 I know he was a good son, a good friend, and a good soldier 
 and a most accomplished traveller. 
 
 Mr. Baber wrote also : — 
 
 I was engaged in defending his remarkable and minute 
 accuracy as a traveller against a very kindly critic, on the very 
 
 ^ A painted window in memory of Captain Gill has been put up by 
 nis brother officers of the corps in Rochester Cathedral ; a tablet also in 
 Brighton College chapel by subscription of those connected with that 
 institution ; and three ' Gill Scholarships ' for the sons of oSficers of the 
 army have been founded at the same college, by subscription largely 
 aided by the family. 
 
 d 
 
[64] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
 
 day when the sad calamity of his death was made known ; and 
 what is strange enough, on the same day I received a letter 
 from him which had been delayed, bearing date July 14, and 
 containing these almost prescient words : — ' 
 
 ' I am tearing my hair that I am not in Egypt, but if there 
 is any sort of military expedition I shall go there either on duty 
 or on leave, and I think that, peace having been concluded, my 
 next wanderings will be in Asia Minor or in Syria. But God 
 knows I seldom go to a place that I have thought much about' 
 
 He would often tell me that he had a horror of old age ; and 
 in answer to the argument that age is the period of literary 
 enjoyment, and that there is pleasure in watching the labour of 
 others, which is only the continuation and completion of our 
 own, he would reply : ' No ; life is worthless without activity. 
 I do not wish to live long.' 
 
 Colonel Frederick Burnaby wrote in the ' Times ' of 
 October 30, among other things, of Captain Gill : — 
 
 In the age in which we live, men like this unfortunate officer 
 ai'e seldom seen. Unfortunate officer ! Yet why should I have 
 written those words ? He died not in battle, it is true, but was 
 slain after having been employed upon the most dangerous duty 
 which he could perform— that of cutting a telegraph wire in a 
 hostile country.' Certain death would naturally have been the 
 lot of any one if discovered. He knfew full well his risk, but 
 danger to him was nothing new. He played his life as he had 
 played it on many other occasions. This time was once too 
 often. He died, as he would have wished, for England. 
 
 Of fine-weather friends there are enough and to spare ; but 
 friends such as Captain Gill, whose first thought was for others 
 and how best to lend them a helping hand, are few and far be- 
 tween. Only accident made us aware of his numerous acts of 
 generosity, and many people who have been aided by him will 
 feel acutely the death of their benefactor. His good deeds 
 were done secretly — his right hand did not know what his left 
 gave away in charity. The poor have lost a friend, the profes- 
 sion to which he belonged has been deprived of one of its 
 brightest ornaments. 
 
 The Rev. Df, Macduff, who had known Gill from 
 
 boyhood, writes of him in a work called 'Early Graves' : — 
 
 All that was allied to, or had connivance with what was 
 
 ' It was then supposed that this duty had been accomplished beforS 
 the disaster. 
 
{66] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF CAPTAIN GILL. 
 
 Baron von Richthofen's testimony to the value of Gill's 
 journeys in Western China and Tibet has been already 
 quoted. I extract a few more words of a recent letter from 
 the same great traveller and geographer : — 
 
 I have only twice seen Gill for a few days, but I deplore his 
 death as that of a friend. Reserved oh the surface, but ardent 
 below ; these words render fully his character. I like to recall 
 in my mind the first impression which I got of him before he 
 went to China, and which satisfied me at once that he was im- 
 usually qualified for carrying out successfully his great plans. 
 
 I then saw him again after his return, calm and modest as 
 before, but just as ardent and ready to engage in new en- 
 terprises. He has deserved a better fate, . . . although, in 
 either case, he lost his life -honourably for his country, en- 
 gaged in a brave and daring enterprise. . . . Gill was at the 
 commencement of his career : his. boldness and enterprise 
 might have conducted him to deeds of importance. However, 
 his travels in China, of which the excursion to Sung-pan-ting 
 shows best his eminent personal qualifications as a traveller, 
 will secure them a lasting and very honourable memory beyond 
 his native country. 
 
 Fame is thefpurre that the clear fpirit doth raise 
 {That last infirmitie of noble mind) 
 To /corn delights, and live laborious dayes; 
 But the fair guerdon when we hope to find. 
 And think to burft out into ftidden blaze. 
 Comes the blind Furie with the abhorred fhears 
 And flits the thin-fpun life. 
 
 William Gill was indeed one who scorned delights and 
 lived laborious days, nor need we contest that the infirmity 
 of which Milton speaks in those magnificent lines had some 
 hold on him ; but it was far from being the leading motive 
 of his acts. That lay in the burning desire to put to some 
 good use the internal force of which he was conscious, to 
 make some sacrifice for the Country which he loved, and for 
 whose honour and greatness he was very jealous! She has 
 lost that loving and ungrudging service all too early, as it 
 seems to our mortal and partial vision ; not, however, 
 through the movement of a ' blind Fury ' or stolid Atropos, 
 but by the Will of Him who sees and guides the Whole. 
 
[66] A BRIEF MEMOIR OF CAPTAIN GILL. 
 
 Baron von Richthofen's testimony to the value of Gill's 
 journeys in Western China and Tibet has been already 
 quoted. I extract a few more words of a recent letter from 
 the same great traveller and geographer : — 
 
 I have only twice seen Gill for a few days, but I deplore his 
 death as that of a friend. Reserved oh the surface, but ardent 
 below ; these words render fully his character. I like to recall 
 in my mind the first impression which I got of him before he 
 went to China, and which satisfied me at once that he was un- 
 usually qualified for carrying out successfully his great plans. 
 
 I then saw him again after his return, calm and modest as 
 before, but just as ardent and ready to engage in new en- 
 terprises. He has deserved a better fate, . . . although, in 
 either case, he lost his life -honourably for his country, en- 
 gaged in a brave and daring enterprise. . . . Gill was at the 
 commencement of his career : his. boldness and enterprise 
 might have conducted him to deeds of importance. However, 
 his travels in China, of which the excursion to Sung-pan-rting 
 shows best his eminent personal qualifications as a traveller, 
 will secure them a lasting and very honourable memory beyond 
 his native country. 
 
 Fame is thefpurre that the clear fpirit doth raise 
 {That last infirmitie of noble mind) 
 To /corn delights, and live laborious dayes; 
 But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, 
 And think to burfl out intofUdden blaze, 
 Comes the blind Furie with the abhorred f hears 
 And flits the thin-fpun life. 
 
 William Gill was indeed one who scorned delights and 
 lived laborious days, nor need we contest that the infirmity 
 of which Milton speaks in those magnificent lines had some 
 hold on him ; but it was far from being the leading motive 
 of his acts. That lay in the burning desire to put to some 
 good use the internal force of which he was conscious, to 
 make some sacrifice for the Country which he loved, and for 
 whose honour and greatness he was very jealousi She has 
 lost that loving and ungrudging service all too early, as it 
 seems to our mortal and partial vision ; not, however, 
 through the movement of a ' bUnd Fury ' or stolid Atropos, 
 but by the Will of Him who sees and guides the Whole. 
 
( ; 
 
 A 
 
 m 
 
 ^i :.y «>l 
 
 /*^ I ^ 
 
 
 In memory of three brave meN: 
 
 Trofessor EDWARD HENRY PALMER. 
 Fellow of S. Johns College Cambridge, 
 Lord Almoners Reader in Arabic and 
 A Scholar and Linguist of rare genius: 
 
 Captain WILLIAM JOHN GILL. RE. 
 AN Ardent and Accomplished Soldier 
 and a Distinguished ExploreRj 
 
 Lieutenant HAROLD CHARRINGTON. 
 r.n. of h.m.s. euryalus, a young 
 Officer of High Promise; 
 
 Who when travelling on public duty 
 into the Sinai Desert were treacherously 
 and cruelly slaw in the Wady Sadr 
 August w? MDCCCLXXXIL 
 
 Their Remains after the lapse of 
 many weeks, having been partially 
 
 RECOVERED AND BROUGHT TO ENGLAND, 
 WERE DEPOSITED HERE WITH CHRISTIAN 
 
 Rites, April e^H MDCCCLXXXUl. 
 
 This Tablet has been erected by 
 the Country in whose service they 
 perished to Commemorate their Names, 
 their Worth and their Fate. 
 
 That tragic Fate was shared by Twa 
 Faithful Attendants, the Syrian Khalil 
 Xtik and the Hebrew Bakhor Hassun, 
 whose remains lie with theirs. 
 
 "Our Bones lie scattered before the Pit, 
 as uDhen one breaketh and cleaiseth 
 Wood upon the Earth, but our cues 
 look unto Thee O Lord God!" Ps cxi. 
 
 '"^1 
 
 L«^A 
 
 
 
 ^s 
 
 fi ; 
 
 
 
 I "\.\ 
 
4> 
 
 
 to elncidalc recent exploration 
 
 ftn tJu. 
 TIBETO -CHINESE FRONTIER 
 
 ScaU: 176 MUs - Ihtch. 
 
 "WJtAJKUahasToiLiambar^. 
 
 Tondoiv j0hvlhnnff.J.Ihan/irU'Strect/,1883. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 (Origitiallywritten 1879; ^«corf 1883.) 
 
 § I. ' The River of Golden Sand ' was printed during 
 the absence of. its author at Constantinople in 1879 (see 
 p. [31]), and we had been so much in communication on 
 the subject of his intended book that the business of seeing 
 it through the press in his absence seemed naturally to 
 devolve on me. On Gill's return he and my friend Mr. 
 Murray asked me to write a preface to the book ; and out 
 of this request arose the somewhat lehgthy essay which is 
 now reproduced, with a few modifications, including some 
 passages intended to bring it up to the date of the present 
 republication. 
 
 § 2. The ' general reader,' whose eye may be caught by 
 the title of this work, will not, we trust, be misled by the 
 familiar melody of Bishop Heber to suppose, that the tra- 
 veller will conduct him to ' Afric's sunny fountains.' The 
 ' River of Golden Sand ' is a translation of the name Ktn- 
 Sha-Kiang, or (in the new orthography, in which I find it 
 hard to follow my author) Chin- Sha- Chiang (Gold-Sand- 
 River), by which the Chinese, or at least Chinese geogra- 
 phers, style the great Tibetan branch of the Yang-tzii, down 
 to its junction, at Sii-9hau (or Swi-Fu, as it is now called), 
 with the Wen or Min River, descending from Ssfi-Ch'uan. 
 Of other names we shall speak a little below. 
 
 It is proposed now to indicate some of the points of 
 geographical interest in the little-known region of which the 
 River of Golden Sand is as it were the axis — that region 
 of Eastern Tibet which intervenes between the tw great 
 
[68] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 historic continents of India and China — and to sketch the 
 history of explorations in this tract previous to that of Cap- 
 tain Gill. If in this task I sometimes use words that I have 
 used before, on one or other of the somewhat frequent 
 occasions that this dark region, from which the veil lifts but 
 slowly, has attracted me,' let me be forgiven. And all the 
 more one may overcome scruples at such repetition in seeing 
 how persistent error is. I recently read of ' an able argu- 
 ment ' (I certainly did not read the argument itself) to prove 
 the identity of the Tibetan Tsanpu and the Irawadi. Life 
 seems too short for the study of able demonstrations that 
 the moon is made of green cheese, but, if these are still to be 
 proffered, there can be no harm in stating the facts again.^ 
 
 I do not forget the pungent words with which Abbd 
 Hue concludes his sparkling Souvenirs (fun Voyage : ' Quoi- 
 qu'il soit arrivd au savant Orientaliste, J. Klaproth, de 
 trouver I'Archipel Potocki, sans sortir de son cabinet, il est en 
 gdn^ral assez difficile de faire des ddcouvertes dans un pays 
 sans y avoir pdnetrd.' ' But as regards a large part of the 
 country of which I am going to speak we are all on a level, 
 for no one has seen it, not even the clever Abb^ himself 
 and his companion ; and of geographical information re- 
 garding the region in question, they can hardly be said to 
 have brought anything back. 
 
 ' E.g., in a review of Hue and Gabet in Blackwood, 1852 ; in con- 
 nection with the Narrative of Major Phayre's Mission to Ava (Calcutta 
 1856, London 1858) ; in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 
 for 1861, p. 367 ; in the notes to Marco Polo ; and in various papers in 
 Ocean Highways and the Geographical Magazine, and discussions in the 
 Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society (the last occasion reported 
 in the number for May 1882, pp. 269-271). 
 
 '' Since the first publication of this essay I have seen the work in 
 question ; and I desire to say that I mean no disparagement to its 
 author, Mr. R. Gordon, a most diligent observer, and valued public 
 servant ; though I do regret the time and ingenuity expended on the 
 maintenance (as I judge) of an untenable theory. 
 
 ' The name of Potocki Islands was given by Klaproth in honour of 
 Count Potocki, under whom he had served on a Russian mission to Pe- 
 king, to a group of eighteen islands in the Gulf of Corea. ■ This sheet 
 of the Jesuit map of China had been mislaid or omitted when D'Anville 
 engraved it. Klaproth afterwards became owner of the missing tracing, 
 and no it, sans sortir de son cabinet, found these islands, and claimed 
 their discovery. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [69] 
 
 § 3. Everyone who has looked at a map of Asia with his 
 eyes open must have been struck by the remarkable aspect 
 of the country between Assam and China, as represented, 
 where a number of great rivers rush southward in parallel 
 courses, within a very narrow span of longitude, their de- 
 hneation on the map recalling the fascis of thunderbolts in 
 the clutch of Jove, or (let us say, less poetically) the aggre- 
 gation of parallel railway lines at Clapham Junction. 
 
 Reckoning these rivers from the westward, the first of 
 importance (i.) is the Subanshiri, which breaks through the 
 Himalaya, and enters the valley of Assam in long. 94° 9'. 
 This is a great river, and undoubtedly comes from Tibet, 
 i.e. from Lhassa territory. Some good geographers have 
 started the hypothesis that the Subanshiri, rather than the 
 Dihong, is the outflow of th* Tsanpu ; but recent informia- 
 tion shows this to be next to impossible, 
 
 § 4. The next of these great rivers (ii.) is the Dihong, 
 which enters Assam in long. 95° 17', and joins the Lohit — 
 or proper Brahmaputra — near Sadiya. Though the identity 
 of this river with the great river of Central Tibet, the Yaru 
 Tsanpu, has never yet been continuously traced as a fact of 
 experience, every new piece of evidence brings us nearer to 
 assurance of the identity, and one might be justified in saying 
 that no reasonable person now doubts it. Instead of being 
 a new and heterodox theory invented by a European geo- 
 grapher, as its latest opponents have imagined, it is the old 
 belief of the natives on both sides of the mountains. It was 
 indeed the belief of the illustrious Rennell, who first recog- 
 nised the magnitude of the Brahmaputra, long before we 
 had any knowledge of the Dihong, or of the manner and 
 volume of its emergence from the Mishmi Hills.'' Many 
 
 * ' On tracing this river in 1765, 1 was no less surprised at finding it 
 rather larger than the Ganges than at its course previous to its entering 
 Bengal, This I fouijd to be from the east; although all the former 
 accounts represented it as from the north ; and this unexpected dis- 
 covery soon led to inquiries, vrhich furnished me with an account of its 
 general course to within 100 miles of the place where Du Halde left the 
 Sanpoo. I could no longer doubt that the Burrampooter and Sanpoo 
 were one and the same river, and to this was added the positive assur- 
 ances of the Assamers " that their river came from the north-west. 
 
[70] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 years, however, before Rennell's work was published, in fact, 
 twelve years before Rennell was born, P. Orazio della Penna, 
 writing in Tibet (1730), had stated that the river was then 
 believed to join the Ganges, explaining (from such maps as 
 were available to him in those days) ' towards Rangamatti 
 and Chittagong.' A conjecture to the same effect occurs in 
 the memoir on the map of Tibet, by Pfere Regis, at the end 
 of du Halde. Giorgi, in his Alphabetum Tibetanum (Rome 
 1762), says the like.* The same view is distinctly set forth 
 in the geography of Tibet which is translated in the 14th 
 volume of the great French collection of Memoires concer- 
 nant les Chinois, a document compiled by order of the 
 Emperor K'ang-hi, and issued, with others of like character, 
 in 1696. This represents the Yaru Tsanpu as rising to the 
 west of Tsang (West Central Tibet), passing to the north- 
 east of Jigar-Kungkar (south of Lhassa), flowing south-east 
 some 400 miles, apd then issuing at the south of Wei (or 
 U, East Central Tibet) into the region of the Lokh'aptra, 
 ' tattooed people ' (i.e. Mishmis et hoc genus omne) ; then 
 turning south-west it enters India, and discharges into the 
 southern sea (pp. 177-178). Mr. David Scott, the first 
 British commissioner of Assam after the first Burmese War 
 (about 1826), met with Lhassa merchants in that province, 
 who told him that the Brahmaputra was their own river, that 
 it passed Lhassa, penetrated the frontier mountains, and 
 there received an additional supply from the Brahmakund. 
 Wilcox heard the same from a Mishmi chief. 
 
 § 5. The Pundit Nain Singh, on the journey to Lhassa 
 which first made him famous (1865), was told by Nepalese, 
 Newars, and Kashmiris at that city, that the great river of 
 
 through the Bootan Mountains."' — Mem. of a Map of Hindoostan, 3rd 
 edition, pp. 356-7, see also p. 259. Rennell's actual knowledge of the 
 Brahmaputra extended only to long. 9r°, a few miles above Goalpara, 
 but his sketch of the probable entrance of the river from Tibet is very 
 like the truth. On the other hand, it is curious how he was misled as 
 to the source of the Ganges, which he identified with what are really 
 the upper waters of the Indus and- Sutlej. The importance of the 
 Dihong was first pointed out by Lieutenant Wilcox in 1826, in the 
 Calcutta Gazette. (See As. Ses, vol. xvii.) 
 
 ' ' Sese tandem in Gangem exonerat.' But Giorgi's information was 
 derived from della Penna and the other Capuchins. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [71] 
 
 Tibet was the Brahmaputra ; whilst all the natives who were 
 questioned also declared that, after flowing east for a consider- 
 able distance, it flowed down into India. The Pundit's in- 
 formation on his last great journey, when he crossed the river 
 somewhat further to the eastward, before striking south into 
 Assam, did not add much, but it was all in corroboration of 
 the same view.^ And this has been still further confirmed 
 by the report of exploration from the Chief of the Indian 
 surveys for 1878-9. 
 
 The explorer (N — m - g) took up the examination of the 
 Tsanpu at Chetang, where it was crossed by Nain Singh on 
 his way from Lhassa to Assam (in about long. 91° 43', lat. 
 29° 15'), and followed it a long way to the eastward. He 
 found that the river, before turning south, flows much 
 further east than had been supposed, and even north-east. 
 It reaches its most northerly point in about long. 94°, and 
 lat. 30°, some 12 m. to the north-east of Chamkar. The 
 river then turns due south-east, but the explorer was not 
 able to follow it beyond a place, 15 miles from the great 
 bend, called Gya-la Sindong. There, however, he saw that 
 it flowed on for a great distance, passing through a consider- 
 able opening in the mountain ranges, to the west of a high 
 peak called yK«^-/a. Chamkar appears in D'Anville's map 
 as Tchamka, and in one of Klaproth's ^ as Temple Djamga, 
 in a similar position with regard to the river. And Gya-la 
 Sindong seems to be the Temp. Sengdam of the latter map, 
 standing just at the head of the ' defill: Sing-ghian Khial,' by 
 which Klaproth carried off the waters of the Tsanpu into 
 the Irawadi. If the position of Gya-la Sindong as deter- 
 mined by the explorer is correct, its direct distance ftom the 
 highest point hitherto fixed on the Dihong river, from the 
 Assam side, is only about 100 miles.* 
 
 " See Journal of Royal Geographical Society, xlvii. p. 116. It is 
 remarkable that the information collected by the Pundit on his first 
 journey was most accurate as to the position where the river turns to the 
 south, which he placed in about long. 94°. (See Montgomerie, in 
 J. R. G. S., xxxviii. p. 218, noie.) His later conclusion was less 
 accurate. 
 
 ' In vol. iii. of his Mimoires Relatifs h PAsie. 
 
 ' This is just the, space at which Rennell, 100 years ago, estimated 
 the unknown gap. (See p. [69] note, above. ■> 
 
[72] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 « § 6. Evidence more recent and more positive has been 
 adduced, in the end of 1882, by the return of another of 
 Gen. Walker's explorers after an absence of four years in 
 Tibet and Mongolia. Omitting the greater part of his travels, 
 which are not relevant to the present question, we may state 
 briefly that after visiting Ta-Chien-Lu and Bat'ang, he got 
 as far as Sama (or Samd, see pp. [77-78] infra) in an attempt 
 to reach Assam by the direct route. Here he was stopped, 
 and had to take the circuitous route by Alanto and Gyamdo, 
 whence he turned to Chetang on the Tsanpu, and thence 
 by Giangze Long and Phari to Darjiling. Now, as General 
 Walker justly observes, if the Tsanpu river passes into the 
 Irawadi, the traveller must have crossed it between Bat'ang 
 and Sama, between Sama and Gyamdo, and again at Chetang. 
 But he is positive that he crossed the Tsanpu only once, viz. 
 at Chetang ; and that on the way from Sama to Gyamdo 
 there is a great range to the west separating the basin of the 
 affluents of the Tsanpu from that of the streams flowing to 
 the east. One of these latter may possibly fall into the 
 Irawadi, but the Tsanpu assuredly cannot do so. 
 
 We have mentioned above that some have supposed 
 the Subanshiri to be the real continuation of the Tsanpu. 
 The idea seems to have been grounded in part on an ex- 
 aggerated estimate of the volume of the Subanshiri, and 
 partly on Nain Singh's indications (in 1874) of the course 
 of the Tsanpu, which seemed to bring it in such close juxtapo- 
 sition to the Subanshiri as to allow no room for the develop- 
 ment of another river of such volume as was attributed to 
 the latter. The last of these foundations for the theory 
 has been removed by the explorer N— m — g's extended 
 journey, carrying the south-eastern bend of the Tsanpu 
 so much further to the east ; and the first also was erron- 
 eous. Careful and detailed observations by Lieut. Harman 
 in 1877-78 give the comparative volumes of the Assam 
 rivers with which we have to do, at their mean low level, as 
 follows :— 
 

 
 Cubic feet 
 
 
 
 per second 
 
 Dihong 
 
 . 
 
 55,40° 
 
 Brahmaputra (' 
 
 Lohit ') 
 
 
 above Sadiya 
 
 
 33,832 
 
 Ditto at the Brahmah- 
 
 
 Kund 
 
 
 25, OCX) 
 
 Dibong 
 
 . 
 
 27,202 
 
 GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION [73 
 
 Cubic feet 
 per second 
 
 Dihong and Dibong be- 
 fore union with Brah- 
 maputra (' Lohit') . 82,652 
 
 The combined (Brahma- 
 putra) river at Dib- 
 riigarh . . .116,115 
 
 The Subanshiri . . 16,945 
 
 We see here how the Dihong vastly surpasses in discharge 
 not only the Subanshiri, but also the Lohit Brahmaputra 
 and the Dibong, while both greatly exceed the Subanshiri.' 
 § 7. Very eminent geographers have, however, not been 
 content to accept the view of the identity of the Tsanpu and 
 the Brahmaputra, and several have contended that the Ira- 
 wadi of Burma was the true continuation of the great Tibetan 
 river. D'Anville, I believe, was the first to start this idea.' 
 It was repeated by our countryman Alexander Dalrymple, 
 the compiler of the ' Oriental Repertory ' and much else, the 
 founder of the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty, 
 and a very able geographer, in a map on a small scale which 
 he put together for "the illustration of Symes's 'Mission to 
 Ava ' (1800). The idea was maintained at a later date with 
 great force and insistence by that remarkable and erratic 
 
 ' It is of some interest to compare these measurements with those 
 made by Bedford and Wilcox in 1825-26. They were as follows (see 
 Asiatic Researches, vol. xvii., but I take them from J. A. S. B. xxix. 
 p. 182) :— 
 
 December 26, 1825 March 29, 1826 
 
 Dihong (after a correction) . {a) 56,000 ft. 
 
 Brahmaputra at Sadiya . . (b) 19,058 ft. (a) 33,965 ft. 
 
 Dibong . . . ■ (l>) 13,100 ft. 
 
 Dihong and Dibong . . 69,664 ft. (a) 86,211ft. 
 
 Subanshiri, ' in dry season ' . (a) 16^000 ft. 
 
 The close approximation in those marked (a) to Lieutenant Harman's 
 recent measurements is remarkable ; whilst in (b) the discrepancy is 
 great. All Lieut. Harman's measurements were taken in March. In 
 some the rivers had risen, and the low level discharge was arrived at 
 by calculation. But it is a pity that no notice is taken of the older 
 measurements in the publication of the recent ones. The suggestion of 
 the facts, on the surface, is that the recent observations do not represent 
 the lowest level, or that the rivers in December 1825 were unusually 
 low. 
 
 ' Aclaircissements Giographiques sur la Carte de VInde, Paris, 
 
 1753, P- 146- 
 
[74] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 genius Julius Klaproth, who in demonstration played fast 
 and loose on a great scale with latitudes and longitudes, and 
 produced Chinese documents from the days of the T'ang 
 dynasty to those of K'ang-hi in corroboration. His disser- 
 tation in its latest form* is, like almost everything that 
 Klaproth wrote, of high interest. We need not, as some 
 other things in his career suggest, doubt the genuineness of 
 the Chinese documents. Some of them at least are to be 
 found translated in independent works, before his time. But 
 everything is not necessarily true that is written in Chinese, 
 any more than everything that is written in Persian — or even 
 in Pushtu ! Chinese writers have found leisure to speculate 
 on geographical questions, as well as Europeans. And some 
 of them, finding, on the one hand, the Tsanpu flowing 
 through Tibet, and disappearing they knew not whither, and 
 finding, on the other, the Irawadi coming down into Burma 
 from the north, issuing they knew not whence, adopted a 
 practice well known to geographers (to Ptolemy, be it said, 
 pace tanti viri, not least) long before Dickens humorously 
 attributed it to one of the characters ,in ' Pickwick '^they 
 ' combined the information,' and concluded that the Tsanpu 
 and the Irawadi were one. Klaproth's view that this was so, 
 and that the actual influx took place near Bhamo, was 
 adopted by many Continental geographers, and staggered 
 even the judicious Ritter. Maps were published in accord- 
 ance with the theory, some bringing the waters of Tibet into 
 the Irawadi by the Bhamo River (down which Captain Gill 
 floated in Mr. Cooper's boat on the last day's journey which 
 he has recorded), and others through the Shwdli, which 
 enters the Irawadi some eighty miles below Bhamb. 
 
 § 8. It seems hardly worth while now to slay this hypo- 
 thesis, which was moribund before, but must be quite dead 
 since the reports of General Walker's two last explorers in 
 those regions. Its existence was somewhat prolonged, es- 
 pecially in France, by the fact that some of the missionaries in 
 Eastern Tibet, of whom we shall speak presently, had. carried 
 out with them elaborate maps, compiled under the influence 
 of Klaproth's theory ; and the ideas derived from these had 
 ' Minioires relatifs a I'Asie, vol. iii. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [75] 
 
 so impregnated their minds that, in communicating geogra- 
 phical information which they had collected on the scene of 
 their labours, it was confused and tinged by the errors of 
 Klaproth. 
 
 The main bases for what we may style the orthodox 
 theory of the Irawadi are found in the constant belief of 
 natives above and below the Tibetan passes, and in the evi- 
 dence of direction and volume. The lamented Col. T. G. 
 Montgomerie, in his most able analysis of the Pundit Nain 
 Singh's first journey, deduced from the particulars recorded 
 by the latter, and a careful oral catechisation, that the dis- 
 charge of the Tsanpu, where crossed below Jigatze (or 
 Jigarchi), could hardly be less than 35,000 feet per second. 
 We see that the discharge of the Dihong, on its emergence 
 from the hills of Assam into the plains of Assam, is 55,400 
 feet. These are in reasonable ratio. Now the discharge of 
 the Irawadi, so far down as the head of the Delta, is not 
 more than 75,000 feet, and at Amarapura it cannot, on the 
 best data available, be much more than the 35,000 feet 
 attributed to the Tsanpu on the table-land of Tibet, at a 
 point which would be at least 1,200 miles above Ava along 
 the banks, if the theory of identity were true.^ 
 
 § 9. The third river (iii.) is the Dibong, which joins the 
 Dihong before its confluence with the Brahmaputra. This 
 has, on Mr. Saunders's map of Tibet accompanying Mr. 
 Markham's book, been identified with the Ken-pu, one of the 
 rivers of Tibet dehneated on D'Anville's map. The Ken- 
 pu, however, we shall see strong evidence for identifying 
 with a different river, whilst there is positive reason to believe 
 that the Dibong, in spite of its large discharge, does not come 
 from Tibet. At a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 
 in 1 86 1, at which I read a paper connected with this subject, 
 Major (the late Major- General) Dalton stated that the people 
 of Upper Assam admitted only two of their rivers to come 
 from Tibet, viz. the Dihong and the (Lohita) Brahmaputra. 
 An attempt was made in 1878 by Captain (now Lieut. - 
 
 ' See Appendix to, Narrative of Mission to the Court of Ava (Major 
 Phayre's), pp. 356 jff. ; and a paper by Major-General A.' Cunningham 
 in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. xxix. pp. 175 seq. 
 
[76] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Colonel) Woodthorpe, R.E., who has done much excellent 
 work in the survey of the Eastern Frontier, to explore the 
 sources of the Dibong. He was not successful in penetrating 
 far up the river, but he considered himself to have derived, 
 from extensive views, and native information in connection 
 with them, ' a fairly accurate knowledge of the sources of the 
 Dibong, and the course of its main stream in the hills ; ' ■* and 
 in the map representing this knowledge the river is indicated 
 as having no source further north than about 28° 52'. 
 
 § 10. We next come to the (iv.) true Brahmaputra, or 
 Lohit, which enters Assam at the Brahmakund, or Sacred 
 Pool of Brahma. This I believe to be identical with the 
 Gak-bo of the Tibetan geographies, and the Ken-pu, or 
 Kang-pu, of D'Anville and the Chinese. 
 
 Granted, as we may now assume, that the Tsanpu is the 
 Dihong, the Ken-pu can hardly be other than either the 
 Dibong or the Lohit. We have seen that the Dibong does 
 not come from Tibet. But there is a very curious piece of 
 evidence that the Ken-pu is the Lohit. 
 
 I have just alluded to a paper connected with our present 
 subject which was read at Calcutta in 1861. This was a 
 letter from Monseigneur Thomine des Mazures, 'Vicar 
 Apostolic of Tibet,' and then actually residing at Bonga in 
 Eastern Tibet, to Bishop Bigandet of Rangoon (himself well 
 known for his works on Burmese Buddhism, &c., and who 
 had been very desirous to estabUsh direct communication 
 with his brethren in the north), and which contained some 
 interesting geographical notices, though they were, as has 
 been already indicated, impaired in value by the erroneous 
 ideas as to the Tsanpu, gathered from Klaproth, with which 
 French maps were then affected.^ The paper was read with 
 a comment by the present writer.^ 
 
 " Letter of Captain Woodthorpe, dated Shillong, August 10, 1878, 
 forwarded by the Government of India, in their letter of October 31, id. 
 
 > Particularly the map, on which Bishop Thomine relied, of Andri- 
 veau Goujon, Paris, 1841. 
 
 * See Jmimcdofthe Asiatic Society of Benf^l, vol. xxx. pp. ^S^seg. 
 The Bishop's letter as sent to the Society had been done into English^ 
 and not always lucid English. In my present quotations I have 
 corrected this. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [77] 
 
 Now in this letter Bishop des Mazures spoke of the 
 series of rivers in question, beginning with the Lant'sang, or 
 Mekong, and traveUing westward. Next to the Lant'sang 
 was the Lu-ts' Kiang (Lu-Kiang or Salwen). Beyond that 
 the Ku-ts' Kiang, of which we shall speak presently, and 
 then the Gak-bo Tsanpu, ' called by the Chinese Kan-pu- 
 tsangbo.' The Bishop, influenced by his Klaprothian map, 
 stated this to join the Irawadi. And this would only have 
 made confusion double but for a circumstance which he 
 proceeded to mention. ' In that district,' he wrote, ' accord- 
 ing to the Tibetans, is the village of Sim^, where our two 
 priests, MM. Krick and Boury, were murdered.' Here was 
 a fact that no theories could affect. These two gentlemen 
 were, in the autumn of 1854, endeavouring to make their 
 way to Tibet from Upper Assam, by the route up the Lohit, 
 attempted fourteen years later by Mr. T. T. Cooper, when 
 they were attacked and murdered by a Mishmi chief called 
 Kaiisa. On the receipt of this intelligence, and after a 
 detailed account of the circumstances had been obtained 
 from the servant of the priests, a party was despatched by 
 the British authorities of Assam into the Mishmi country to 
 capture the criminal chief This was very dexterously and 
 successfully effected by Lieutenant Eden, who was in com- 
 mand. In the beginning of March, Kaiisa and some of his 
 party were taken, and were tried and convicted by Major 
 Dalton. Dr. Carew, the Roman Catholic Archbishop, inter- 
 ceded with the Governor-General for a mitigation. But 
 Kaiisa was hanged. It is an old story, but so. creditable to. 
 several concerned that it has seemed well worth being briefly 
 told here. 
 
 Now the place at which these two travellers were 
 murdered was Sim^, on the banks of the (Lohit) Brahma- 
 putra, a place entered from native information in Wilcox's, 
 map some thirty years before, and some iifteen or sixteen 
 miles above the place where Cooper was turned back in 
 1869. 
 
 I can hardly conceive of better evidence than this re- 
 garding a country unexplored by European travellers, and I 
 have repeatedly adduced it in probf that the Gak-bo or 
 
[78] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Ken-pu is identical with the Lohit, and that the latter comes 
 from Tibet. This, too, being estabhshed, there remains no 
 possibility of communication between the Tsanpu and 
 the Irawadi, unless the Tsanpu pass athwart the basin of 
 the Brahmaputra.? 
 
 Thus, singular to say, from the blood of those two 
 missionary priests, spilt on the banks of the Lohita (the 
 ' Blood-red '), is moulded the one firm link that we as yet 
 possess, binding together the Indian and the Chinese geo- 
 graphy of those obscure regions. And once more has thjs 
 Sim^, Sam^, or Sama on the Lohit, become an important 
 point in reference to the same subject, as we have seen in 
 the notice of the last native explorations at p. [72]. 
 
 § II. (v.) In the Chinese maps, and in Bishop 
 Thomine des Mazures' list of rivers, there comes next a river 
 variously called Tchitovi (D'Anville), Tchod-teng, or ScMtt 
 (Des Mazures)-Chu, all probably variations of the same 
 name, and also Ku-ts^ Kiang (Des Mazures), and in Klap- 
 roth's map the Khiu-shi-Ho. This river, which he calls 
 ' rather inconsiderable,' the Bishop identifies with the Lung- 
 Kiang or Lung-ch'wan Kiang of the Chinese, or Shw^-li of 
 the Burmese, which flows a little east of Momien (called by 
 the Chinese Teng-yueh-chau), and which eventually joins 
 the Irawadi 80 or 90 miles below Bhamo. The Shwd-li 
 does, according to Captain Gill's report, appear to bring 
 down when in flood a vast body of water,' but it has not 
 been seen by any European north of where he crossed it. 
 Dr. Anderson, however, who accompanied Major Sladen's ex- 
 pedition, states that he was positively informed that its sources 
 were only 40 or 50 miles north-east of Momien.' Bishop 
 T. des Mazures, in his identification of the Schetd or Ku-ts' 
 with the Shw^-li, was perhaps again unduly biassed by maps 
 
 ' The only possible doubt is that of the identity of the Gak-bo and 
 the Ken-pu or Kang-pu, but I think there is no room for this. It is 
 asserted by Bishop des Mazures, and a comparison of the course of the 
 Ken-pou of D'Anville's map with the Kakbo Dzanbotsiou of the Chinese 
 map given by Klaproth in his edition of the Description du Tiibet, 
 entirely corroborates this. 
 
 ' See the River of Golden Sand., vol. ii. p. 357; infra, p. 276. 
 
 ' Report on Expedition to Western Yunan, Calcutta, 1871, p. 188. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [79] 
 
 founded on Klaproth's theories, and thus we cannot feel 
 confidence that his statement on this point was derived from 
 native information. Chinese geographical speculators have 
 identified more than one river of Tibet with the Shw^-li, 
 some of them supposing it to be the same with the Gak-bo 
 or Ken-pu.' I have long been inclined to the belief that the 
 Ku-ts' Kiang of the Bishop, the Tchitom-chu of D'Anville, 
 represents the unseen eastern source of the Irawadi, which 
 has been the subject of so much controversy. Dr. Ander- 
 son's Shan informants gave the unvisited eastern branch of 
 the Irawadi the name of Kew (Kiu) Horn, a name possibly 
 identical both with the Khiu-shi of Klaproth and with the 
 Ku-ts' of Bishop Thomine des Mazures. In any case, 
 judging from D'Anville's map, the best authority we as yet 
 have, the sources of this river, and therefore under my pre- 
 sent hypothesis the remotest sources of the Irawadi, will 
 not lie further north than 30° at the most. If so, the ex- 
 treme length of the Irawadi's course will still fall far short 
 of that assigned to the Lu-Kiang, or Salwen, and to the 
 Lant'sang, or Mekong, to say nothing of our 'River of 
 Golden Sand.' And this will be consistent enough with the 
 calculations regarding the discharge of the Irawadi, which 
 will be found in the places quoted at p. [73] above. 
 
 § 12. (vi.) The Lung-Ch'uan Kiang, Lung-Ch'iang of 
 Captain Gill, and Shwd-li of the Burmese. Of this we have 
 spoken under No. v. 
 
 The next of the parallel rivers (vii.) is the Lu-Kiang or 
 Nu- Kiang of Chinese maps, the Lu-ts' Kiang of Bishop des- 
 Mazures, the Salwen of Burma, under which name it enters 
 the Gulf of Martaban. Rennell thought that the Nou-Kian 
 (or Lu-Kiang) of the Jesuit maps must be the upper Ira- 
 wadi. And since then doubts have been thrown on the 
 identity of the Salwen and the Lu-Kiang of Tibetan geo- 
 graphy, by myself many years ago, and more recently by Dr. 
 Anderson ; but I am satisfied that the evidence had not 
 been duly considered. The chief ground for discrediting 
 its length of course and its Tibetan origin was its compara- 
 tively small body of water as reported. This may, however, 
 ' See Ritter, iv. 225. 
 e 
 
[8o] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 be due mainly to a restricted basin — and as far as we know 
 the river from Yun-nan downwards, the basin is very re- 
 stricted ; — but also we see, not only how various the rela- 
 tions between the length and the discharge of considerable 
 rivers may be, but how deceptive, as in the case of the 
 Subanshiri, comparative impressions of discharge are apt to 
 be, in the absence of measurements. The French mission- 
 aries who were for some years stationed near the Lu-Kiang, 
 about lat. 28° 20,' speak of it as a great river. Abb^ Du- 
 rand, June 1863, describing a society of heretical lamas who 
 had invited his instructions, and who were willing to consign 
 the paraphernaKa of their worship to the waters, writes, 
 ' What will become of it all ? The Great River, whose 
 waves roll to Martaban, is not more than 200 or '300 paces 
 distant.'^ ... A river so spoken ©fin lat. 28° 20', or there- 
 abouts, may easily have come from a remote Tibetan source. 
 It is hard to say more as yet, amid the uncertainties of 
 the geography of Tibetan steppes, and the difficulty of dis- 
 cerning between the tributaries of this river and that of the 
 next ; but the Lu-Kiang, or a main branch of it, under the 
 name of Suk-chu, appears to be crossed by a bridge on the 
 high road between Ssii-Ch'uan and Lhassa,^ four stations 
 west of Tsiamdo on the Lant'sang. 
 
 § 13. (viii.) The Lant'sang, or Mekong, the great river 
 of Camboja, which rivals the Yang-Tzii itself in length, has 
 its sources far north in Tibet, but attended with the un- 
 certainties that we 'have spoken of under No. vii. Its lower 
 course has long been known in a general way, but only ac- 
 curately since the French expedition, from its mouth up 
 into Yun-nan, in 1866-67. The town of Tsiamdo, capital 
 of the province of Kham, which stands between the two 
 main branches that form the Mekong, in about lat. 30° 45', 
 was visited by Hue and Gabet, on their return under arrest 
 from Lhassa ; but whatever quasi-geographical particulars 
 Hue gives seem to have been taken, after the manner of 
 
 ' Ann. de la Prof, de la Foi, torn, xxxvii. 
 
 * See Description du Tiibet, translated by Klaproth, p. 222, and com- 
 pare Ritter iv. 252, and 225-6 ; also Hue, ii. 445. The bridge is his 
 Kia-Yu-Kiao, and had fallen just before his arrival. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [8i] 
 
 travellers of his sort, from the Chinese itineraries published 
 in Klaproth's ' Description du Tiibet.' Kiepert, in his 
 great map of Asia of 1864, had apparently so little faith in 
 Hue's statements of this kind, that he makes the two branch 
 rivers of Tsiamdo, after their union, form the source of the 
 (Lohit) Brahmaputra. This was a somewhat wild idea even 
 then ; but now, when Tsiamdo has been visited by later 
 missionaries (as by Bishop des Mazures and Abbd Desgodins 
 in 1866 *), traveUing from and returning to the Chinese 
 frontier, and following at no great distance the course of the 
 Lan-t'sang, there can hardly be a reasonable doubt as to 
 the course of this river as far north as Tsiamdo ; and this 
 is shown roughly in M. Desgodins' map. 
 
 § 14. (ix.) The Kin-sha (or Chin-Sha), ' Golden Sand,' 
 is that which gave a title to Captain Gill's book, a title 
 justified by the fact that he followed its banks, with occa- 
 sional deviations, during four-and-twenty marches on his 
 way from Bat'ang to Ta-Li-Fu. This river is probably the 
 greatest in Asia, as it is certainly the longest,' and one of the 
 most famous ; but it would be excelled even in length were 
 the Klaprothian view of the identity of the Tsanpu and the 
 Irawadi correct ; and far excelled by the Hoang-Ho, if we 
 could view that river with the eyes of a puzzle-headed 
 ecclesiastical traveller of the middle ages, who traversed all 
 Asia, from Astrakhan to Peking, and who seems to have 
 regarded as one river, which was constantly ' turning up ' on 
 his route (and that identical with the Phison of Paradise), the 
 Volga, the Oxus, the Hoang-Ho and the Yang-Tzii. Well 
 might he say with. pride: 'I believe it to be the biggest 
 river of fresh water in the world, and I have crossed it 
 myself !'« 
 
 The sources of the Kin-sha are really, according to the 
 best of our knowledge, in or about long. 90°, i.e. almost as 
 
 ■• Desgodins, La Mission du Thibet, pp. 80-83. The missionaries 
 call the place Tcha-mou-to. ' 
 
 * In length the order of the rivers of the world seems to be given : 
 (i) Mississippi (including Missouri), (2) Nile, (3) Amazon, (4) Yangtsze 
 Kiang (or Kin-Sha-K.), (5) Yenesei. But probably the Congo ought, 
 as now known, to take a high place in this list. 
 
 « John Marignolli, in Cathay, kz. p. 350. . 
 
[82] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 far west as Calcutta. Its upper course, though far below 
 the source, was crossed by Hue and Gabet in the winter of 
 1845 ; and reached, though not crossed, by Colonel Prejev- 
 alsky in January 1873, about long. 90° 40', lat. 35° 50'. Hue 
 crossed the river on the ice, and says nothing of dimensions, 
 though he leaves on our memories that famous picture of 
 the frozen herd of yaks. But from Prejevalsky we have in- 
 formation as to the great size of the river even in this remote 
 portion of its course : the channel, when seen, 750 feet 
 wide, and flowing with a rapid current, but the whole river- 
 bed from bank to bank upwards of a mile wide, and, in the 
 summer floods, entirely covered to the banks, and some 
 times beyond.^ It must have been in this flooded state that 
 it was crossed by a Dutch traveller, Samuel Van de Putte 
 (who has left singularly little trace of his extraordinary 
 journeys), some time about the year 1730.' 
 
 The name given to the river in this part of its course is 
 (Mong.) Murui-ussu, or Murus-ussu, the 'Winding Water,' 
 and (Tib.) Di-chu, or Bhri-chu, the ' River of the (tame) 
 Yak-Cow,' ^ from one or other of which Marco Polo seems 
 to have taken the name Brius which he gives to the river m 
 Yun-nan. 
 
 In leaving the steppes, and approaching the jurisdiction 
 of the Chiriese, it seems to receive from them the name of 
 Kin-sha Kiang, and this name is applied, at least as far as 
 Swi-fu, where it is joined by the Min River 'coming down 
 from Ssu-Ch'uan. Here the Great River becomes navigable 
 to the sea, though the navigation is impeded, as Captain 
 Gill's narrative forcibly depicts, by numerous rapids and 
 gorges hard to pass.' 
 
 ' Prejevalsky, ii. 221. 
 
 » ' After traversing this country one reaches a very large river called 
 Bi-ehu, which, as Signor Samuel Van der, a native of Fleshinghe, in the 
 province of Zeland, in Holland, has written of it, is so large that to 
 Cross it in boats of skins he embarked in the morning, and landed on an 
 island in the evening, and could not complete the passage across till the 
 middle of the following day.'—/". Horace della Penna, in Appendix to 
 Markham's Tibet, p. 312. 
 
 » These are Klaproth's interpretations, in his notes to Horace del.'a 
 Penna. See also Prejevalsky, u.s. 
 
 > Geographical names are largely names given, or at least defined in 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [83] 
 
 Of all the Tibetan and Yun-nan part of the river, ex- 
 cepting in D'Anville's maps, of which the value in this part 
 has always been a little doubtful, we have had, previous 
 to Captain Gill's journey, nothing of actual survey ; of still 
 more recent correction of our knowledge we shall speak 
 below. 
 
 § 15. The next great river (x.) belonging to this series 
 is the Ya-Lung Kiang of the Chinese, a corruption of the 
 Tibetan Jar-lung, or Yar-lung.^ It rises in the mountains 
 called Baian-Kara, on the south of "the Koko-nur basin 
 about lat. 34°, and flows with a course generally southerly 
 and parallel to the Kin-sha, till it joins that river in the 
 middle of its great southerly elbow, about lat. 26° 30'. In 
 its upper course it is called, according to Klaproth's 
 authority, Gnia-mtso, which seems to be the same as the Nia- 
 chu of Captain Gill (ii. 135). The Jar-lung valley was the 
 traditional cradle of the Tibetan monarchy,^ which only at a 
 later time moved into the western highlands of Lhassa. The 
 river was passed, some 260 miles north of the mouth, by 
 Captain Gill on his way from Ta-Chien-Lu to Lit'ang, by a 
 coracle ferry (ii. 139 ; infra, p. 197) ; near this the width 
 varied from 50 to 120 yards, with a rapid broken current. 
 Baggage animals had to be swum across. 
 
 The confluence of the two great rivers Yar-lung and Kin- 
 sha was visited by Lieutenant Gamier and his party in 1868. 
 Gamier thus describes the junction : — ' 
 
 The Kin-sha is here by no means shut in as it is at Mong- 
 kou — (where they had crossed the eastern limb of the great 
 
 their application, by geographers, and one should always speak 
 cautiously as to how a river or mountain-chain in Asia is called by 
 natives on the spot. Blakiston, at the furthest point of the river ascended 
 by him, found it only known as the ' River of Yun-nan. ' So streams are, 
 or used to be, locally known in Scotland only as 'M^ waiter,' or perhaps 
 the ' waiter of — ' such a place. In one part, Captain Gill lells, the 
 great river is known as ' the River of Dregs and Lees. ' 
 
 ^ Rilter gives the meaning of this as ' White River ' (iv. 190) ; 
 Kl^proth as ' Vaste Riviere ' (Description du Tiibet, 190). The Tibetan 
 vocabulary in Klaproth gives ghiar, 'ample, vaste' (p. 145). dKar, 
 'white,' is perhaps the word ; and it will be seen that in its lower course 
 the Chinese do call it Pe-shui, or ' White Water. ' 
 
 " bee Sanang Setzen in Schmidt's Ost-Mongokn, p. 23 and passim 
 
[84] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 bend) ;— and it is reached by a hardly sensible declivity. Little 
 naked hills line the banks. The river comes from the south- 
 west, then describes a curve inclining to io° south of east ; and 
 it is at the apex of this curve that it receives the Ya-long Kiang. 
 The latter arrives from the north, shut in closely by two walls 
 of rock absolutely perpendicular, so that no passage along the 
 banks is possible. Its breadth is nearly equal to that of the 
 Blue River ; * and its current, at least when we saw it, was 
 somewhat stronger. I could not measure the depth of either, 
 but it seemed considerable. As at Mong-kou the flood-rise was 
 ID metres. I was surprised to learn that the country people 
 here gave the name of Kin-sha Kiang to the Ya-long — i.e. to 
 the tributary — and that of Pe-shui Kiang, ' White-Water River,' 
 to the principal stream. If, as regards volume, there was, at 
 first sight, some room for doubt between the two, the aspect of 
 the two valleys showed at once which was entitled to keep the 
 name of Kin-sha Kiang. The mouth of the Ya-long is a sort 
 of accidental gap in the chain of hills that lines the Blue River, 
 and the orographic configuration of the country indicates clearly 
 that the latter river comes from the west and not from the north. 
 . . . This anomaly in their nomenclature will seem less surpris- 
 ing if we remember that in China river-names are always local, 
 and change every 60 miles. About Li-kiang you again find that 
 the Kin-sha has got its proper name, and it is the Ya-long that 
 "is there called Pe-shui Kiang.* 
 
 § 16. The last of these great parallel rivers with which 
 we have to deal is that great branch (xi.), called on our maps 
 Wen and Min Kiang, which we regard geographically as a 
 tributary of the Kin-sha or Yang-Tzu, but which the Chinese 
 hydrographers have been accustomed to regard rather as 
 the principal stream. We find this view distinctly indicated 
 in that oldest of Chinese documents, the Yii-Kung.^ It 
 comes out again prominently in Marco Polo's account of Sin- 
 da-fu (or Ch'eng-Tu-Fu), which is quoted by Captain Gill at 
 thebeginningofhissecondvolume(z'«/ra, p. 141). . . . 'The 
 
 * So the French term the Yang-Tzu. 
 
 » Voyage d' Exploration, i. 503. Gamier gives a view of the con- 
 fluence. 
 
 « See Richthofen's China, i. 325 : ' On the Min-shan begins the 
 course of the Kiang. Branching eastward it forms the To . . . . &c.' 
 The Min-shan is the mountain country north-west of Ssii-Ch'uan. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [85] 
 
 name of the river is Kiansuy' i.e., as the late M. Pauthier 
 explains, Kiang-Shui, 'Waters of the Kiang' (or River 
 Kiang, see He-Shui, a little below). The same view appears 
 in Padre Martini's 'Atlas Sinensis' (1655) ; ' and very dis- 
 tinctly in a paper professedly (and probably in reality) in- 
 dited in 1 72 1 by the great Emperor K'ang-hi, which Klap- 
 roth has translated in that dissertation of his already spoken 
 of regarding the course of the river of Tibet : — 
 
 From my youth up (says the Emperor), I have been greatly 
 interested in geography ; and for such purposes I sent officers 
 to the Kuen-Luen mountains, and into Si-fan. All the great 
 rivers, such as the Great Kiang, the Hwang-Ho (Yellow River), 
 the He-Shui (Black River, the Kara-Ussu of the Mongols), the 
 Kin-Sha Kiang, and the Lan-t'sang Kiang, have their sources 
 in those regions. My emissaries examined everything with 
 their own eyes ; they made accurate inquiries, and have em- 
 bodied their observations in a map. From this it is clear that 
 all the great rivers of China issue from south-eastern slopes of 
 the great chain of Nom-Khiin-ubashi, which separates the in- 
 terior from the exterior system of waters. The Hwang-Ho has 
 its source beyond the frontier of Sining, on the east of the 
 Kulkun mountains. . . . The Min-Kiang has its origin to the 
 west of the Hwang-Ho, on the mountains of Baian-Kara-tsit- 
 sir-khana, which is called in Tibetan Miniak-thsuo, and in the 
 Chinese books Min-Shan ; it is outside of the western frontier 
 of China ; the waters of the Kiang issue from it. . . . According 
 to the Yii-Kung the Kiang comes from the Min-Shan. This is 
 not correct ; it only passes through that range ; this is ascer- 
 tained. This river runs to Kuon-hien,^ and there divides into 
 half a score of branches, which reunite again on reaching Sin- 
 tsin-hien ; thence it flows south-east to Sii-chau-fu [or Swi-Fu] 
 where it joins the Kin-sha Kiang.^ 
 
 Captain Gill, so far as we are aware, was the first 
 traveller to trace this river above Ch'eng-Tu, to the alpine 
 highlands, doubtless the Min-Shan of the Yii-Kung, from 
 which it emerges. This he did on that excursion from 
 
 ' To this remarkable work I tried to do some justice in an artide in 
 the Geographical Magazine iar 1874, pp. 147-8. 
 
 ' The Kuan-hsien of Captain Gill, vol. i. p. 330 ; infra, p. 107. 
 " Klaproth, Memoires relatifs h I Asie, iii. 392. 
 
[86] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Ch'Sng-Tu to the north, in the months of May and June, 
 1877, which is described in the last two chapters of the first 
 volume, entitled, ' A Loop-cast towards the Northern Alps.' 
 § 17. Captain Gill has pointed out that, of the many 
 branches of the river which ramify through the plain of 
 Ch'gng-Tu, no one now passes through the city at all corre- 
 sponding in magnitude to that which Marco Polo describes, 
 about 1283, as running through the midst of Sindafu, 'a 
 good half-mile wide, and very deep withal.' The largest 
 branch adjoining the city now runs on the south side, but 
 does not exceed a hundred yards in width ; and though it 
 is crossed by a covered bridge with huxters' booths, more or 
 less in the style described by Polo, it necessarily falls far 
 short of his great bridge of half a mile in length. Captain 
 Gill suggests that a change may have taken place in the 
 last five (this should be six) centuries, owing to the deepen- 
 ing of the river-bed at its exit from the plain, and consequent 
 draining of the latter. But I should think it more probable that 
 the ramification of channels round Ch'eng-Tu, which is so 
 conspicuous even on a small general map of China, like 
 that which accompanies this work, is in great part due to 
 art ; that the mass of the river has been drawn off to irrigate 
 the plain ; and that thus the wide river, which in the thir- 
 teenth century may have passed through the city, no 
 unworthy representative of the mighty Kiang, has long since 
 ceased, on that scale, to flow. And I have pointed out briefly 
 (ii. 6 ; infra, Yi. 144) that the fact, which Baron Richthofen 
 attests, of an actual bifurcation of waters on a large scale taking 
 place in the plain of Ch'eng-Tu — one arm ' branching east 
 to form the To ' — (as in the terse indication of the Yii-Kung) 
 viz. the To-Kiang or Chung-Kiang flowing south-east to 
 join the great river at Lu-Chau, whilst another flows south 
 to Sii-chau or Swi-Fu, does render change in the distribution 
 of the waters about the city highly credible.' 
 
 ' A short but interesting notice of the irrigatioa and drainage of the 
 plain of Ch'eng-Tu is given by Richthofen in his seventh letter to the 
 Shanghai Chambers, p. 64. He mentions that the existing channels, 
 though not those close to the city, reach in some instances to a width 
 of 1,000 feet. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [87] 
 
 The various branches, except those that diverge, as just 
 said, to the Ch'ung-Kiang, reunite above Hsin-Chin-Hsien 
 (Sin-tsin-hien of Richthofen, Sing-chin of the general map), 
 which was Captain Gill's second station in leaving Ch'eng-Tu 
 for Tibet. Up to this point the main stream of the Min is 
 navigable, whilst boats also ascend the easternmost branch 
 to the capital.. Indeed, vessels with 100 tons of freight 
 reach Ch'dng-Tu by this channel when the river is high.^ At 
 Kia-ting-fu the Min receives a large river from the moun- 
 tains on the west, the Tung-Ho, which brings with it both the 
 waters of the Ya-Ho, from Ya-Chou (see vol. ii. p. 47 ; infra, 
 p. 159), and those ot the river of Ta-Chien-Lu. Kia-ting is an 
 important trading place, the centre of the produce in silk and 
 white-wax, and situated in a lovely and fertile country. Below 
 this the Min-Kiang is a fine, broad, and deep stream, with a 
 swift but regular current,* and obstructed by only one rapid, 
 at Kien-wei, but that a dangerous one. It joins the Kin-sha, 
 as so often mentioned, at Sii-Chau or Swi-Fu. 
 
 § 18. We have spoken, perhaps at too great length, of 
 the great parallel rivers which form the most striking physical 
 characteristic of the region between India and China. Let 
 us now say something of the history of a problem tJiat 
 many attempts have been made to solve : that of opening 
 direct communication between these two great countries. 
 
 How difficult a problem this is will be, perhaps, most 
 forcibly expressed by the circumstance that in all the com- 
 plex history of Asiatic conquest — and in spite of the fact 
 that you can hardly lay your finger on an ordinary atlas-map 
 of Asia without covering a spot that has at one time or 
 other been the focus of a power whose conquests have 
 spread far and wide over that continent — at no time did a 
 conqueror from India ever pass to China, nor (unless with 
 one obscure and transient exception, which will be noticed 
 below) a conqueror from China to India, nor at any time, 
 omitting the brief passage of Chinghiz, who barely touched 
 
 ' Richthofen, p. 71. 
 
 ' Cooper says, ' often a mile wide ; ' but the river was unusually 
 high, for it was, he says, 'unbroken by a single rapid.' Richthofen 
 specifies the frequent wrecks in the rapid at Kien-wei. 
 
[88] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the Punjab, did the conquests of any conqueror embrace 
 any part of both countries. 
 
 Moreover, Chinese history seems to establish the fact 
 that India first became known to China, not across these 
 lofty highlands and the vast fissures in which the rivers flow 
 of which we have spoken, but by the huge circuit of Bactria 
 and Kabul. The idea that there was a more ancient inter- 
 course between the two great countries, and that the Chinas 
 of the Laws of Menu and of the Mahabharat were Chinese, 
 must, I now believe, be abandoned. The Chinas, as Vivien 
 de St. Martin and Sir H. Rawlinson have indicated, are rather 
 to be regarded as a hill-race of the Himalaya, probably identi- 
 cal with the Shtnas of Dardistan. The first report of India 
 was brought to China in the year B.C. 127, in the reign of 
 Hsia-wu-ti of the Han dynasty, when Chang- Kien, a military 
 leader who had been exploring the country about the Oxus, 
 returned after an absence of twelve years, and, among many 
 other notices of Western Asia, reported of a land called 
 Shtn-Tu—i.e. Sindu, Hindu, India — of which he had heard 
 in Tahia, or Bactria, a land lying to the south-east, moist 
 and flat and very hot, the people civilised, and accustomed 
 to train elephants. From its position, and from the fact 
 that stuffs of Shu {i.e. Ssu-Ch'uan, see vol. ii. pp. 17, 35) 
 arrived in the bazaars of Bactria through Shin-Tu, Chang- 
 Kien deduced that this country must lie not far from 
 the western provinces of China. Several efforts were in 
 consequence made to penetrate by the Ssii-Ch'uan frontier 
 to India ; one got as far as Tien (now a part of Yun-nan), but 
 others not even so far. The King of Tien stopped the 
 envoys of the Han, and would not allow them to explore 
 the routes by which India was reached. When communica- 
 tion opened with India some 200 years later, it was by the 
 circuitous route of Bactria, and so it continued for centuries. 
 
 § 19. If the acute general of the Han was right about 
 the stuffs of Shu, the trade that brought these stuffs must 
 have been of an obscure hand-to-hand kind, probably 
 through Tibet, analogous in character to the trade which 
 in prehistoric Europe brought amber, tin, or jade from vast 
 distances. But it is curious to set alongside of these 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [89] 
 
 Chinese notices of obscure trade reaching to India that 
 remarkable passage in the ' Periplus,' a work of the first 
 century a.d., which speaks of Thin, and of its great city 
 Thinae, ' from which raw silk, and silk thread, and silk stuffs 
 were brought overland through Bactria to Barygaza (Bhroch), 
 as they were on the other hand by the Ganges River to Limy- 
 rike ' (Dimyrike, the Tamul country, Malabar). Ptolemy, 
 too, a century later, says that there was not only a road from 
 the countries of the Seres and of the Sinae tq Bactriana by 
 the Stone Tower {i.e. by Kashgar and Pamir), but also a 
 road to India which came through Palibothra (or Patna). It 
 is probable that this traffic was still only of that second- and 
 third-hand kind of which we have spoken, and the mention 
 of Palibothra recalls the fact that Patna is the Indian 
 terminus at which the Fathers Grueber and D'Orville arrived 
 after their unique journey from Northern China by Tibet. 
 
 Returning to the ' Periplus,' the passage that we have 
 referred to is foUo'tsred by another speaking of a rude mon- 
 goloid people (it is the shortest abridgment of the descrip- 
 tion) who frequented the frontier of Thin, bringing mala- 
 bathrum or cassia leaves. These, I think, may undoubtedly 
 be regarded as some one or other of the hill tribes on the 
 Assam frontier, and I should in this case regard the mention 
 of Thin as vaguely indicating the knowledge, as aliready 
 popular in India, that there was a great land bearing a name 
 like that beyond the vast barrier of mountains. In a like 
 way we find the name of Mahachin applied in the fifteenth 
 century by Nicolo Conti, and in the sixteenth century by 
 Abu'1-Fazl, to the countries on the Irawadi ; and I remem- 
 ber, many years ago, seeing a Tibetan pilgrim at Hardwdr, 
 whose only intelligible indication of where he came from was 
 ' Mahachin.' 
 
 § 20. As our subject is the history not of communica- 
 tion generally between China and India, but only of that 
 communication across their common highland barrier, we 
 are bound, so far as our knowledge goes, to stride at once 
 from pseudo-Arrian to Marco Polo. There is in the inter- 
 . val, indeed, an obscure record of a Chinese invasion of India, 
 which should perhaps constitute an exception. 
 
[go] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 In 641, the King of Magadha (Behar, &c) sent an 
 ambassador with a letter to the Chinese court. The 
 Emperor, who was then Tai-tsung of the T'ang dynasty, 
 probably the greatest monarch in Chinese history, in return 
 sent one of his officers to go to the King with an imperial 
 patent, and to invite his submission. The King Shiloyto 
 (Siladitya) * was all astonishment. ' Since time immemorial,' 
 he asked his courtiers, ' did ever an ambassador come from 
 Mahachina ? ' ' Never,' they replied. The Chinese author re- 
 marks here, that in the tongue of the barbarians, the Middle 
 Kingdom is called ' Mohochintan ' {Mahdchinasthdnd). 
 A further exchange of civilities continued for some years. 
 But the usurping successor of Siladitya did not maintain 
 these amicable relations, and war ensued, in the course of 
 which the Chinese, assisted by the kings of Tibet and Nepal, 
 invaded India. Other Indian kings lent aid and sent sup- 
 plies ; and after the capture of the usurper Alanashan (?), 
 and the defeat of the army commanded by his queen on the 
 banks of the Khien-to-wei, 580 cities surrendered to the arms 
 of China, and the king himself was carried prisoner to that 
 country. 
 
 Chinese annals colour things, but they are not given to 
 invention, and one can hardly reject this story.* It is 
 probable, however, even from the story as it is told, that this 
 
 ■• This Siladitya is a king of whom much mention is made in the 
 Memoirs of Hwen-T'sang. He was a devout Buddhist, and a great 
 conqueror, having his capital at Kanauj, and a dominion extending 
 over the whole of the present Bengal Presidency, from the sea to the 
 frontier of Kashmir. 
 
 ' The account is found in Stanis. Julien's pape^ s from Mat-wan- 
 lin, in the Jour. Asiat. ser. iv. tom. x. See also Cathay, and the Way 
 Thither, p. Ixviii., and Richthofen's China, pp. 523 536-7. It is 
 stated that Wang-hwen-tse, the envoy who went on the mission that 
 resulted in this war, wrote a history of all the transactions in twelve 
 books, but it is unfortunately lost. The Life of Hwen T'sang states 
 that that worthy, when in India, prophesied that, after the death of 
 Siladitya, India would be a prey to dreadful calamities, and that per- 
 verse men would stir up a desperate war. The same work mentions as 
 the fulfilment that Siladitya died towards the end of the period Yung- 
 hwei (A.D. 650-655), and that in conformity with the prediction, India 
 ' became a prey to the horrors of famine,' of which the" envoy Wang- 
 hwen-tse, just mentioned, was an eye-witness. But no mention is made 
 of the Chinese invasion. 
 
GeSgRAPHICAL introduction. [91] 
 
 was rather a' Nepalese and Tibetan invasion, promoted and 
 perhaps led by Chinese, than a Chinese invasion of India. 
 Lassen, as far as I can discover, does not deal with the sub- 
 ject at all. The name of the river on which the Indian 
 defeat took place, Khien-to-wei, would according to the 
 usual system of metamorphosis represent Gandhava ; gu. 
 the Gandhak ? (Sansk Gandakavati). 
 
 § 21. The story, told by Firishta and others, of an inva- 
 sion of Bengal by the Mongols, 'by way of Cathay and 
 Tibet,' during the reign of 'Ala-ud-din Musa'dd, King of 
 Delhi (a.d. 1244), has been shown by my friend Mr. Edward 
 Thomas to have arisen out of a clerical error in MSS. of 
 the contemporary history called Tabakdt-i-Ndsiri.^ But two 
 preposterous attempts were made in the thirteenth and four- 
 teenth centuries, at the counter-project, the invasion of the 
 countries above the Himdlaya from Gangetic India. 
 
 The first of these (a.d. 1204) was the adventure of Ma- 
 hommed Bakhtiyar Khilji, the first Mussulman conqueror of 
 Bengal, and ruler of Gaur, of whom the historian just quoted 
 says, that ' the ambition of seizing the country of Turkestan 
 and Tibet began to torment his brain.' The route taken is 
 very obscure ; the older interpretations carried it up into 
 Assam, but Major Raverty's conclusion that it ascended the 
 Tista valley is perhaps preferable. The Khilji leader is 
 stated to have reached the open country of Tibet, a tract 
 entirely under cultivation, and garnished with tribes of peo- 
 ple and populous villages. The strenuous resistance met 
 with, the loss in battle with the natives, and the distress of 
 the troops from such a march, compelled a retreat ; they 
 were sorely harassed by the men of the Raja of Kamrud 
 (apparently Kdmriip, of which Assam was the heart), and 
 Mabommed Bakhtiyar finally escaped with but a hundred 
 horsemen or thereabouts, and soon after fell ill and died. 
 
 The second attempt was one of the insane projects of 
 Mahommed Tughlak, which took place in 1337. It was^ 
 according to Firishta, directed against China, but it must 
 be said that there is no mention of China as the object in 
 
 " See Thomas's Pathdn Kings of Dehli, p. 121. 
 
[92] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCflON. 
 
 the earlier accounts. The account given by the historian 
 Zid-ud-din Barni, who wrote in the next generation, is as 
 follows : — 
 
 The sixth project, which inflicted a heavy loss upon the 
 army, was the design which he formed of capturing the moun- 
 tain of Kardjal. His conception was that, as he had under- 
 taken the conquest of Khufdsdn, he would (first) bring under 
 the dominion of Islam this mountain, which lies between the 
 territories of Hind and those of China, so that the passage for 
 horses and soldiers, and the march of the army, might be ren- 
 dered easy. To effect this, a large force, under distinguished 
 amirs and generals, was sent to the mountains of Kardjal, with 
 orders to subdue the whole mountain. In obedience to orders 
 it marched into the mountains, and encamped in various, places ; 
 but the Hindus closed the passes, and cut off its retreat. The 
 whole force was thus destroyed at one stroke, and out of all 
 this chosen body of men only ten horsemen returned to Dehli 
 to spread the news of its discomfiture.' 
 
 The account given by the traveller Ibn Batuta, who was 
 then at the court of Mahommed Tughlak, is to the same 
 effect ; and though he mentions the names of two places 
 that were taken by the troops, Jidiya before entering the 
 mountains, and Warangal in the hill-country, Ibn Batuta 
 does not aid us by these (the last of which is altogether 
 anomalous) in fixing the locality, any more than he helps us 
 to understand the object, of the enterprise. 
 
 § 2 2. Coming now to Marco Polo, whose steps it would 
 be hard for any traveller in a little-known region of Asia 
 altogether to avoid, we may briefly say that on the first 
 important mission to which he was designated by the' Great 
 Khan Kublai, in making his way to the frontier of Burma 
 {Mien), he travelled from Ch'8ng-Tu {St'ndafu), by the route 
 which Captain Gill followed, as far probably as Ch'ing-Chi- 
 Hsien. This was Captain Gill's ninth march from Ch'6ng-Tu. 
 We do not know the length of Marco's daily journeys, but 
 after five such from Ch'eng-Tu, he was already in Tibet. 
 Probably the country which was counted as Tibet, in those 
 days, began immediately on passing Ya-Chou and entering 
 
 ' Elliot's History of India, &c. (by Dowson), iii. 241-2. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [93]- 
 
 the mountains. From Ch'ing-Chi-Hsien the routes diverge. 
 Captain Gill, bound for Ta-Chien-Lu and Bat'ang, strikes 
 north-west ; Marco Polo's route continued to bear south- 
 south-east, towards the city of Ning-Yuan-Fu, the existing ■ 
 capital of the beautiful valley of Kien-Chang, the Caindu or 
 Ghiendu of the Venetian. This is the route on which Baron 
 Richthofen's journey met with an unfortunate interruption 
 (see p. [112]), and which has since been travelled by Mr. 
 Baber. It is the road by which the greater part of the goods 
 for Bhamb and Ava used to travel from Ch'eng-Tu, before 
 the Mahommedan troubles in Western Yun-nan. Those 
 goods went on by a direct road from Kien-Chang to Ta-Li-Fu. 
 But Marco Polo's road led him south, and across the great 
 elbow of the Kin-sha to the city of Yun-Nan Fu (his Yacht). 
 From this he travelled to Ta-Li-Fu {Carajari), and thence to 
 Yung-Chang-Fu ( Vochan or Unchan). Beyond this there are 
 difficulties as to the exact extent and direction of his travels, 
 concerning which some discussion occurs in vol. ii. chap, 
 viii. of Captain Gill's book, as well as in my own com- 
 mentary on the book of Marco. It would hardly profit to 
 enter here on a detailed recapitulation of a discussion which 
 as yet has confessedly received no satisfactory determination. 
 § 23. Ta-Ij-Fu, which is so often spoken of in these pages, 
 and is so prominent a point in Captain Gill's narrative, is 
 indeed a focal point on this frontier at which many routes 
 converge ; and for ages it has been the base of all operations, 
 military or commercial, from the side of China towards 
 Burma. It may still be regarded as the capital of Western 
 Yun-nan, as it was in the days of Marco Polo. Ta-Li-Fu, for 
 some centuries before Kublai Khan, the master whom Marco 
 served, conquered it (a.d. 1253), had been the seat of a 
 considerable Shan kingdom, called by the Chinese Nan (or 
 Southern)- Chao : this latter term being a Shan word for 
 ' prince,' which still figures among the titles of the kings of 
 Siam, and of all the other states of that wide-spread race. 
 During the recent brief independence of the Mahommedans 
 or PantMs (probably themselves as much Shan as Chinese 
 in blood), Ta-Li again became a seat of royalty, and here 
 reigned Tu-wen-hsiu, alias Sultan Suliman, from about i860 
 
[94] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 to 1873, when the city was captured by the Imperialists, and 
 the Mahommedans were massacred. The king himself took 
 poison, but his head was sent in honey to Peking.' 
 
 Mr. Baber, quoted at p. 303 of vol. ii. {infra, p. 251), says 
 that the terms Sultan and Suliman were quite unknown on the 
 spot. The fact is that in Indo-Chinese countries Islam has 
 never assimilated the nationality of those who profess it, as in 
 Western Asia. This is the case in some degree in Java, as 
 it is in greater degree in Burma, and no doubt more than all 
 in China. The people, in these countries, professing Islam, 
 are to be compared with Abyssinian professors of Christian- 
 ity. At the court of the Mussulman Sultan of Djokjokarta, 
 in Java, I have had the honour of being introduced to half 
 a dozen comely sultanas, and of shaking hands with them ; 
 whilst I have seen the Sultan and his Court taking part in a 
 banquet at the Dutch Residency, and in drinking a number 
 of toasts, of which a printed programme in Dutch and 
 Javanese was distributed. In the capital of Burma, where 
 professing Mahommedans are much less secluded from the 
 influence of more orthodox Moslems than those of Yun-nan 
 are, they have been characterised in passages of which I 
 extract the following : ' As might be expected, they are very 
 ignorant sons of the Faith, and, in the indiscriminating cha- 
 racter of their diet, are said to be no better than their 
 neighbours ; so that our strict Mussulmans from India were 
 not willing to partake of their hospitalities.' And as regards 
 names : ' Every indigenous Mussulman has two names. 
 Like the Irishman's dog, though his true name is Turk, he 
 is always called Toby. As a son of Islam, he is probably 
 Abdul Kureem ; but as a native of Burma, and for all 
 practical purposes, he is Moung-yo, or Shw^-po.'^ The 
 style of 'Sultan Suliman,' &c., was no doubt confined to the 
 few Hajjis or MoUahs that were at Ta-h. That there were 
 such is proved by the Arabic circular which was issued, and 
 which reached the Governtnent of India in the way mentioned 
 at page [99] note 5, below. The following is an extract from 
 
 " Tu-Wen-Hsiu, or, as Cooper calls him phonetically, Dow-win- 
 sheow, had been a wealthy merchant in Tali. 
 
 ' Mission to the Court of Ava in 1855, pp. 151.-152. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [95] 
 
 that document : ' Followers of Mahommed ! in telling 
 you how it fared with us, we offer grateful thanks to the 
 Almighty. It behoves you to rejoice in the grace that God 
 hath shown to us. . . . God gave us courage and created 
 fear in the hearts of the Idolaters, so we, by the decree of 
 God, did defeat them. . . . Therefore we have set up a 
 Mahommedan Sultan ; he is prudent, just, and generous. 
 . . . His name is Sddik, otherwise called Sulimdn. He has 
 now established Mahommedan law. . . . Since we have 
 made him our Imam we have been, by the decree of God, 
 very victorious. . . . The metropolis of infidelity has become 
 a city of Islam.' 
 
 Bhamb, again, a small stockaded town, in lat. 24°' 16', 
 stands on a high bank over the Irawadi, on its eastern side, 
 about two miles below the entrance of a considerable stream, 
 which we have been used to call, from the Burmese side, the 
 Ta-peng River, but which Captain Gill, who followed its 
 course almost the whole way from Teng-Yueh-Chau (or 
 Momien) to its confluence with the Irawadi, calls the Ta-Ying 
 Ho, or T'eng-Yueh River. Here, or hereabouts, has long 
 been the terminus of the land-commerce from China ; and 
 as early as the middle of the fifteenth century we find at 
 Venice, on the famous world-map of Frk Mauro (who no 
 doubt got his information from Nicolo Conti, who had wan- 
 dered to Burma earlier in that century), on the upper part of 
 the riv£r of Ava, a rubric which runs : Qui le marchatantie 
 se translata da fiume a fiume fer andar in Chataio. ' Here 
 goods are transferred from river to river, and so pass on to 
 Cathay.' And in the first half of the seventeenth century 
 there is some evidence of the maintenance here of an English 
 factory for the East India Company. 
 
 § 24. The right to travel in the interior of China was 
 first conceded by Article IX. of the Treaty of Tien-Tsin ' 
 
 ' Art. IX. — British subjects are hereby authorised to travel, for 
 their pleasure or for purposes of trade, to all parts of the interior, under 
 passports which will be issued by their Consuls, and countersigned by 
 the local authorities. These passports, if demanded, must be produced 
 for examination in the localities passed through. ... If he (tbe 
 traveller) be without a passport, or if he commit an offence against the 
 law, he shall be handed over to the nearest Consul for punishment, but 
 
 f 
 
[96] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 which conferred it on all Englishmen. And this treaty un- 
 doubtedly constitutes a landmark from which we are to date 
 the commencement of modern exploration, and of a more 
 exact knowledge, only now being slowly built up, of the 
 physical geography of the country, of its natural resources, 
 and of the true characteristics of the cities and populations 
 of China. But here it is necessary to interpose a caveat. 
 AVhen we speak of the commencement of modern exploration 
 in China and Tibet, or allude to any modern traveller as 
 being the first to visit this or that secluded locality in those 
 regions, it must always be understood that we begin by 
 assuming a large exception in favour of the missionaries of 
 the Roman Church : for those regions have to a great extent, 
 and for many years past, been habitually traversed by the 
 devoted labourers who have been extending the cords of 
 theii Church in the interior, and on the inland frontier of 
 China. Geographical research is not their object, and for a 
 long period publicity was only adverse to their purpose ; and 
 thus their labours and their journeys in those remote regions, 
 which long preceded the treaty of Tien-Tsin, though often 
 recorded in the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi and 
 similar journals for those who seek them there, have only 
 occasionally come before the notice of geographical societies, 
 or of the public in Europe. There are, indeed, notable 
 exceptions, of which we shall presently take account ; but 
 apart from these, in hardly any instance has a traveller pene- 
 trated in this region to a point where he has not found a 
 member of these Roman Catholic missions to have been 
 before him. 
 
 § 25. We have already alluded to the Jetter -written from 
 Tibetan territory by an eminent member of these missions, 
 which reached the Asiatic Society of Bengal, to their no small 
 surprise, in 1 86 1. When Lieutenant Garnier and his party 
 made their rapid and venturesome visit to Ta-Li-Fu, in 1868, 
 their guide and helper was their countryman M. Leguilcher, 
 of the same mission, whom they found in his seclusion near 
 the north end of the Lake of Ta-Li-Fu, and with whom 
 
 he must not be subjected to any ill-usage in excess of personal 
 restraint. . . 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [97] 
 
 Captain Gill made acquaintance nirle years later at the city 
 itself. Not only at Ch'ung-Ch'ing and at Ch'Sng-Tu did 
 Captain Gill find kindly aid among the members of these 
 missions, but at Ta-Chien-Lu, on the acclivity of the great 
 Tibetan plateau, like Mr. Cooper before him, he found, as 
 we have mentioned in his Memoir, cordial welcome from the 
 venerable Bishop Chauveau. 
 
 Members of the same body were found by both travellers 
 also at Bat'ang, in the basin of the Kin-sha, and on both 
 occasions, at nine years' interval, the Abbd Desgodins was 
 one of their number. 
 
 Bat'ang appears to be at present the furthest station of 
 the missionaries towards Tibet ; nor have they any now 
 within the actual Lhassa dominions. But at one time they 
 had for some years establishments within the political, as 
 well as the ethnical, boundary of Tibet. Abbd Renou, the 
 first of the body to make an advance in this direction, obtained 
 in 1354 a perpetual lease of Bonga, a small valley in the hills 
 adjoining the Lu-Kiang on its eastern bank, for a rent of 
 16 or 17 taels. This is under the Government of Kiang-ka, 
 _ where officials both Chinese and Tibetan reside. The mis- 
 sionaries of Bonga cleared a good deal of land, erected 
 buildings, and began to have considerable success in making 
 converts, both among the wilder tribes of the hills and 
 among the Tibetan villagers around them. But in 1858 they 
 were violently ejected by the person who had given the lease^ 
 aided by an armed party. No redress was got till 1862, when 
 the Treaty of Tien-tsin began to take actual effect ; the suit 
 of the missionaries was heard in the Court at Kiang-ka, and 
 they were reinstated at Bonga. Three years later, however, 
 the neighbouring Lamas, who, as Captain Gill several times 
 explains, are very unpopular themselves, and who were aL 
 the more disposed to view with jealousy whatever success the 
 missionaries had among the people, took advantage of 
 disorders in the province, and expelled the missionaries from 
 Bonga and other settlemejits outside the Chinese political 
 frontier. MM. Desgodins and F. Biet, who were at Bonga, 
 after a good deal of violence on one side, and some ad- 
 ministration of presents on the other, were allowed to carrv 
 
 f2 
 
[gS] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 off their flock into Chinese territory, but their establishment 
 was sacked and b.urnt (September 29, 1865). MM. Durand 
 and A. Biet, who directed an out-station at a place called 
 Kie-na-tong (among the Lu-tse), on the Salwen, just within 
 the Yun-nan boundary, were driven away, and the former 
 was shot in crossing a swing bridge. 
 
 Monseigneur Chauveau, who had at this time succeeded 
 to the government of the mission, established his head- 
 quarters at Ta-Chien-Lu, on the borders of what we should in 
 India call the Regulation and the Non-Regulation Provinces, 
 and out-stations were still maintained at Tseku and Yerkalo 
 on the Lant'sang ; the former under Yun-nan, the latter in 
 the Bat'ang territory, but none in Tibet proper. 
 
 § 26. In January 1867 the Kaji Jagat Sher, an envoy 
 from Maharaja Jung Bahadur to the Court of China,^ was 
 passing through Bat'ang, and made the acquaintance of the 
 missionaries there. Their communications were in English, 
 which was probably indifferent on both sides ; but what the 
 Nepalese envoy said led the French fathers to suppose that 
 the British Government in India had heard of their sufferings 
 at the hands of the Tibetans, and had requested the Nepal 
 Governmerit to make inquiry.^ M. Desgodins accordingly 
 sent by the hands of Jagat Sher a very interesting letter, 
 written in very imperfect English, and addressed to the 
 Resident at Katmandu (then Colonel George Ramsay), with 
 a full account of their circumstances, of the violent treatment 
 they had met with, and of the murder of M. Durand. The 
 Governor-General, in replying to Colonel Ramsay's com- 
 munication of this letter, expressed the deep interest with 
 which he had read it, but intimated that the only intervention 
 in their favour possible would be through the Maharaja of 
 Nepal, and through our Minister at Peking. The Govern- 
 ment letter went on : — 
 
 2 Cooper met Jajat Sher both at Ch'eng-Tu and near Bat'ang in 
 returning. The Envoy had met with very bad treatment from the 
 Chinese, and was not allowed to proceed beyond Ch'eng-Tu. (See 
 Ccoper, pp. 158 jcj?., 398j'cy. ) 
 
 = Jt does not seem to have been the fact that any news of the k'nd 
 had reached India. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [99] 
 
 You will, at the same time, however, observe that if the 
 Government may be permitted to offer an opinion to men 
 animated by higher considerations than those of mere personal 
 security or success, these reverend gentlemen would do well to 
 abandon the country in which their sufferings have been so 
 great, and settle in British India, where there are extensive and 
 peaceful tracts, such as Lahoul, Spiti, and Kulu, containing a 
 semi-Thibetan population, likely to receive Christianity with 
 favour. 
 
 Copies of the correspondence were sent to our Minister 
 at Peking, and of the letter intended for the missionaries, 
 not only thither, and to Nepal, but to Ladak and Upper 
 Assam. This shows how difficult any communication is 
 across the iron wall that separates British India from the 
 Chinese frontier ; ^ and it is greatly to be questioned if any 
 one of the four copies ever reached its destination. That 
 sent by Nepal was suppressed by the Chinese Amban at 
 I>hassa ; the messenger wo- Assam failed in making his way, 
 and after going fifteen days' journey from Sadiya, returned ; 
 the copy from Ladak was forwarded by Dr. Cay ley through 
 the inauspicious medium of a monsignore of the Tibetan 
 Curia, who was returning to Lhassa. Of that sent by Peking 
 the fate has not reached us ; it is doubtful, from the allu- 
 sion to the subject in a collection of notices on Tibet by 
 M. Desgodins, whether it ever was received.^ 
 
 * There are but three cases in our time that I can recall in which 
 the iron wall was pierced by a piece of intelligence. The first was the 
 murder of MM. Krick and Boury, of which we have spoken above. 
 The second was this communication from the priests at Bat'ang to the 
 Resident at Katmandu. The third was the Arabic proclamation or 
 circular, issued in the name of the Panthe rulers at Ta-Li-Fu, for the 
 information of the Mahommedan world, which also reached Colonel 
 Ramsay at Katmandu. A copy of it was given me by the lamented 
 Mr. J. W. Wyllie, and it was printed by my late friend Lieutenant Fr. 
 Gamier (to whom I gave it) in the appendix to his Voyage d! Exploration, 
 vol." i. p. 564. 
 
 * See that work (Za Mission du Thibet de 1855 cL 1870, Verdun, 
 1872), pp. 115, 116. The facts in the text are gathered from a corre- 
 spondence in the India Office After Lord Lawrence's death I read 
 a Roman Catholic article which, while doing him noble justice in 
 most respects, spoke regretfully of. the narrow Ulster type of religion 
 in which he had been educated, or words to that effect. I will only 
 say that the Viceroy who despatched the letter quoted above, and 
 
[loo] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 § 27. This is, however, anticipating in chronological ' 
 3rder. The first picture of Eastern Tibet in modern times 
 was that set forth by the Abbe Hue in the famous narrative 
 of his journey with Gabet, which astonished the world in 
 1850. It is true that occasional letters from both Hue and 
 Gabet had appeared in various numbers of the Annates de la 
 Propagation de la Foim 1847-1850, but the circle to which 
 that publication speaks was then probably even more 
 limited and exclusive than it is now ; and I cannot find that 
 practically anything was known to the public of their remark- 
 able journey prior to the publication of the work. Sir John 
 Davis, indeed, has told us how he furnished Lord Palmerston, 
 as early as 1847, with some particulars of the journey, which 
 his secretary, Mr. Johnstone, had obtained from Gabet, who 
 was his fellow-passenger to Europe, and these appear to have 
 been printed, for there are most curiously confused allusions 
 to them ill the article 'Asia,' in the eighth edition of the 
 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' published in 1853.^ And up to 
 1855 there is absolutely, so far as I can discover, no notice 
 of Hue or his companion in the Journals of the Royal 
 Geographical Society, or in the arinual discourses of its 
 Presidents, except a singularly meagre one in Captain (after- 
 wards Admiral) W. H. Smyth's address of 1851, a reference 
 which is certainly a notable example of scientific puritanism, 
 true though it be that Hue does not belong in any sense or 
 measure to the 'scientific category.'' Just as little was he 
 
 took all this trouble for these remote French Roman Catholic priests, 
 was Sir John Lawrence, whilst the signature to the letter is that of Sir 
 William Muir. 
 
 « ' Our scanty knowledge of Tibet has lately received a valuable 
 addition in the journal of the Rev. Mr. Piich, a French missionary, 
 who proceeded from Peking, through Mongolia and Tangut, to 
 L'Hassa, the capital of Tibet, which he left for China by the road 
 through Kham. An English translation of his MS. journal was 
 recently published under the -mspices of Lord Palmerston.' The final 
 redactor of the article was e\'idently unable to make anything of the 
 'Rev. Mr. Puch,' and at the same time unwilling to disturb the refer- 
 ences of Ms predecessor, so he tells us that ' the travels of Hue, Gabet, 
 and Fuch have made some additions to our knowledge of Tartary 
 and Tibet.' (8th edit. vol. i. \. 754.) 
 
 ' ' The Narrative of a Residence in the Capital of Thibet, by 
 M. Hue, a Lazarist missionary, contains some corroborative details 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [loi] 
 
 entitled to be ranked, as he is by a late pretentious . French 
 writer on Chinese matters, with Pauthier (who with all his 
 faults was a genuine and enthusiastic student), and with that 
 modest and indefatigable scholar Mr. Alexander Wylie, 
 lumping all three together, as this, writer does, as ' excellents 
 sinologues.' ' That Hue was, as a ' sinologue,' next door to 
 an impostor, and that his brilhant and, in the main, truthful 
 sketches of travel in Tartary and Tibet were followed by later 
 works of a greatly degenerated character, is undeniable. 
 But it is equally undeniable that Hue was a daring and dis- 
 tinguished traveller, and the author of one of the most 
 delightful books of travel ever written.^ 
 
 § 28. Many years before Hue's book appeared, we had, 
 indeed, in the immortal work of Carl Ritter — at once a 
 quarry and an edifice— a full, and, as far as all our subse- 
 quent information goes, an accurate account of the great 
 road from Ch'eng-Tu to Lhassa, by Ta-Chien-Lu, Bat'ang, 
 Tsiamdo, &c., with the detail of its daily stages. This is 
 taken from Klaproth's French edition of the Chinese Descrip- 
 tion du TUbet, as rendered into Russian by the priest Hyacinth 
 Bichurin (Paris, 1831). Hue makes a good deal of use of 
 this itinerary, which describes the road which he followed 
 on his return from Lhassa, in the very scanty contributions 
 to geography which his narrative contains ; but had it been 
 printed as an appendix to his book, we should have followed 
 his journey with more intelligence. In judging of his work 
 from a geographer's point of view, however, it is fair to remem- 
 ber that, on this half of the journey at least, he and Gabet 
 were travelling under arrest. 
 
 At the time "of Hue's return the Roman Catholic missions 
 had apparently no outpost beyond Ch'Sng-Tu. It was, as we 
 
 respecting a country imperfectly known to Europeans.' — your. R. Geog. 
 Soc. XX. p. Ixx. 
 
 9 See the Athenaum, August 18, 1877, in which there is a review by 
 the present writer of the work referred to. 
 
 » I have spoken more fully regarding Hue in the Introductory 
 Essay to my friend Mr. Delmar Morgan's translation of Colonel Pre- 
 jevalsky's travels, and have there defended the substantial truth of his 
 ' Souvenirs ' against the Russian traveller's charges. That Hue 
 embellished, and especially in his dramatic reports of conversations, no 
 one can question. 
 
[io2] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 have seen, about eight years afterwards that they began to 
 estabHsh themselves on the Tibetan frontier and beyond it. 
 And apart from their httle known movements, it was not till 
 1 86 1 that any new endeavour occurred to penetrate those 
 regions. 
 
 § 29. The first attempt to act in this direction upon the 
 concessions of the treaty of Tien-Tsin was the voyage of 
 Captain Blakiston, Lieutenant-Colonel Sarel, and Dr. Barton, 
 accompanied by Mr. (since Bishop) Schereschewsky of an 
 American mission, up the Yang-Tzii. Their object was to 
 penetrate by Tibet, and across the Himalaya, into India. 
 That was a bold aim, which even at this date, eighteen years 
 later, has never been accomplished. But they were the first 
 ■to ascend the Great River above Hankow, and penetrated 
 to some fifty miles above the confluence of the Min River 
 at Sii-chau (Swi-Fu), reaching the town of Ping-shan. Here 
 it was found impossible to go on, for their boatmen Refused 
 to advance any further on the river, and a land attempt was 
 impracticable in the then disturbed state of the country. 
 Captain Blakiston was a diligent surveyor, and brought back 
 a detailed chart of the river for 840 miles.' Blakiston and 
 Sarel left Hankow in March 1861, and reached it again at the 
 end of June. The work which Captain Blakiston published 
 on the subject of this voyage ^ contains much of interest, and 
 the excellent woodcuts from Dr. Barton's sketches. Turning 
 to another side of the geographical territory of which we are 
 speaking, we should mention here an attempt made by two 
 members of the Government service in Pegu (Captain C. E. 
 Watson, and Mr. Fedden of the Geological Survey) to pene- 
 trate northward to Thein-ni, on the direct road between the 
 Burmese capital and Ta-Li-Fu.^ They reached a point with- 
 
 ' A comparison of Blakiston's chart with the old Jesuit representa- 
 tion of the river as given in D'Anville's maps is very favourable to the 
 general correctness of the latter. Captain Gill, who made the com- 
 parison at my request, wrote : ' Generally the agreement is very 
 remarkable. The greatest difference in general conformation is 
 between I-tu and the entrance to the Tung-ting Lake.' 
 
 ^ Five Months on ike Yangtsze, &c. London, J. Murray, 1862. 
 
 ' Sel ctions from the Records of the Government of India in Foreign 
 Department. No. xlix. 1865. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTIOh. [103] 
 
 in little more than a march of Thein-ni, but the place was 
 then in the hands of an insurgent chief, and they were 
 obliged to turn back. T^ie road is thus one which remains 
 unexplored. It runs through the secluded Shan principality 
 of Kaingma, in about latitude 23° 32', and thence to the 
 Chinese city of Shun-Ning-Fu, called by the Burmese 
 Shwen-li, and by the Shans Muangchan. At one part of 
 this road, between Thein-ni and Shun-ning, it enters a tract 
 partaking of the excessively unhealthy character ascribed by 
 Marco Polo and by Captain Gill (ii. 345-6 ; infra, pp. 272-4) 
 to the same region a little further north, and the road then 
 crosses the Mekong by an iron suspension bridge. 
 
 § 30. In 1868, no less than three attempts from three 
 different points were made to penetrate the obscurities of the 
 region of which we are treating : one by the French expedi- 
 tion which started from Saigon ; a second by Mr. Cooper, 
 from Ssii-ch'uan ; the third by an English expedition from 
 Bhamb on the Irawadi. 
 
 The great effort of the French party under Captain 
 Doudart de la Gr^e of the navy, had been the exploration of 
 the Mekong, which they ascended and surveyed from the delta, 
 as far as Kiang-Hung, in lat. 22° o' (a place that had been, 
 reached by Lieutenant, afterwards General, W. C. McLeod 
 of the Madras army, on his solitary journey from Maulmain 
 in 1837).'' From this point they travelled through Southern 
 Yun-nan, to the provincial capital, Yun-Nan-Fu, which they 
 reached at the end of 1867, the first time in our knowledge 
 that any European traveller (not being a missionary priest) 
 had seen the Yachi of Marco Polo, since he himself was 
 there, circa 1283. 
 
 In view to examining the upper waters of the Mekong, 
 and to other objects not very clear, but of which one perhaps 
 was merely that of penetrating to a place which had been 
 the subject of so much speculation, and the scene of such a 
 singular revolution, the leaders of the party were very desir- 
 ous to reach Ta-Li-Fu, then the capital of the chosen sove- 
 reign of the Mahommedan, or quasi- Mahommedan, rebels 
 
 ^ The latitude of McLeod agrees perfectly with that of the French ; 
 there is a difference of 9' in their longitudes. 
 
[104] 
 
 GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of Yun-nan, whom we, after the Burmese, call Panthes. The 
 Chinese imperialist authorities at Yun-Nan-Fu received with 
 laughter and amazement the proposal of the Frenchmen 
 that they should be allowed to pass direct from the capital 
 to the rebel outposts ; but they were bent on success, and 
 achieved it at a later date, starting from Tong-ch'uan-fu, in 
 the northern part of the province (lat. 26° 25^'). Captain 
 Doudart was too ill to take part in the expedition, though 
 
 Lieutenant Francis Gamier, of the French Navy 
 
 his danger was not then suspected ; and the conduct of this 
 digression fell to Lieutenant Francis Gamier. Starting from 
 Tong-Ch'uan, January 30, 1868, they crossed and recrossed 
 the River of Golden Sand on the eastern and southern limbs 
 of its great southward curve, passing near Hwai-Li, and cross- 
 ing on the second occasion near the confluence of the Yar- 
 lung with the Kin-sha. In the advance nearer Ta-Li the 
 party owed much (as has been already noticed) to the 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [105] 
 
 patriotic aid of M. Leguilcher. The meeting of the party 
 with this gentleman in his remote parsonage at Tu-Tui-Tse, 
 near the northern end of the Lake of Ta-Li, is not unlike the 
 famous meeting of Stanley and Livingstone ■.^— 
 
 One of our guides pointed out to me, some hundred metres 
 below, a little platform, hung as it were in mid-air against the 
 flank of the mountain ; there were a few trees planted in rows, 
 and a group of houses surmounted hy a cross. I began running 
 down the break-neck winding path, and before long I came in 
 sight of a man with a long beard standing on the edge of the 
 platform, who was attentively regarding me. In a few minutes 
 more I was by his side : ' Are not you Pfere Leguilcher ? ' I 
 said. ' Yes, sir,' he answered with a little hesitation, ' and no 
 doubt you are come to announce Lieutenant Gamier, from 
 whom I have just had a letter ?■' My dress, my unkempt look, 
 my rifle and revolver, no doubt gave me in the Father's eyes 
 the look of a buccaneer ; it was evidently not at all what he 
 expected in an officer of the Navy ! — ' I am the man who wrote 
 the letter, mon pfere,' I said, laughing, ' and I see you take me 
 for my own servant. . . .' We exchanged a cordial grasp of the 
 hand, and I introduced the members of the expedition as they 
 
 ' Accompanied by M. Leguilcher the party reached Ta-I^i- 
 Fu, but they had to leave it in hot haste (March 4) within 
 thirty-six hours of their arrival. The success of their retreat 
 was due to the tact and boldness of Garnier. They returned 
 to Tong-ch'uan by the route they had come, and on their 
 arrival found that their gallant leader, Captain Doudart de 
 la Grde, had died in their absence. 
 
 § 31. Some years later, after having completed a splendid 
 and valuable book, and after taking an active part in the 
 defence of Paris in 1871, Garnier returned to China, bent 
 on fresh exploration. What he accomplished before he was 
 called away to another field, on which he fell, was chiefly in 
 the detailed examination of the navigation of the Upper 
 Yang-tzii, and of some of the scarcely known tributaries of 
 the great river in Kwei-chau and Hu-nan. 
 
 But the object which he had made specially his own aim 
 
 " Voyage d' Exploration, p. 510. 
 
[io6] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 was the exploration of the virgin field of Tibet. Indeed, in 
 this direction he had, like my other friend. Captain Gill, 
 aimed very high : — 
 
 I am come to China (he wrote), as you conjecture, to endea- 
 vour to penetrate Tibet. My object is to reconnoitre that part 
 of the Ydrii-tsang-pu which lies between Lhassa and Sadiya. If 
 I am able — but I doubt it sorely — I should wish to return by 
 the west, i.e. by Turkestan. I have just returned from Peking, 
 where I have been to ask for passports, and letters of recom- 
 mendation to the Chinese ambassador at Lhassa. I have seen 
 reason to think, however, that these passports will have no 
 great value, and that the difficulties to be encountered in pene- 
 trating Tibet will be very great. And they will be enhanced by 
 this, that instead of aiming at Lhassa by the usual road, I wish 
 to adopt a more southerly line (about the 29th degree of latitude) 
 so as to cross the sources of the Camboja and the Salwen, and 
 to make an attempt to explore the sources of the Irawadi. The 
 Brahmaputra-Irawadi question is, in my judgment, far from 
 being absolutely settled ; and you have yourself, in the maps 
 attached to Marco Polo, prolonged the Irawadi hypothetically 
 beyond the limit assigned to it in your map of 1855. . . ? 
 
 In another letter, one of the last received from him, he 
 recurred to the subject : — 
 
 I thank you much for the paper you sent me on the hydro- 
 graphy of Eastern Tibet. I must have said more than I in- 
 tended, if in my last letter I led you to suppose that I inclined 
 to the identity of the Irawadi and Tsang-pu. All chances and 
 probabilities seem to me the other way, and in favour of the 
 Brahmaputra, and my general map expresses this sufficiently. 
 But we have to do with a country so singular, and so little like 
 any other, that what would elsewhere amount to proof positive, 
 leaves us here still in doubt. Like you I have no doubt that 
 the continuation of the Irawadi is to be sought in some river of 
 Tibet. The reasons which you assign for identifying this river 
 with the Kuts' Kiang or Ch^t6 Kiang of Monsgr. des Mazures 
 are very forcible. Did I tell you that we were informed in 
 Burmese Laos that the Irawadi continued northward as a great 
 river, which the Laotians call the Nam-mao, and which they 
 distinguish from the Nam-Biim and the Nam-Kiii (Myit-ng^ 
 
 " Letter, dated April 17, 1873, to the present writer. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [107] 
 
 and Myit-gyi).'' The Nam-mao appears to be the Kuts' Kiang. 
 .... I desire to avoid forming a theory, even in my own mind, 
 for nothing hoodwinks a traveller like the adoption of a precon- 
 ceived idea, .... but I repeat as regards the Brahmaputra 
 the probabilities require to be corroborated by material demon- 
 stration. 
 
 The south-eastern region of Tibet, as far as we could judge 
 on our approach to Li-kiang-fu and Tali, is a country full of 
 surprises. The rivers vanish and appear again. A stream will 
 bifurcate, and, by help of the caverns which abound in that 
 limestone formation, the two branches will sometimes change 
 from one basin into another, discharging into two different 
 rivers. My impression — you will think it a strange one — is 
 that, as regards the Brahmaputra and the Irawadi, or, in more 
 general terms, at some point of the connection of the fluvial 
 system of Tibet with that of India and Indo-China, there is a 
 perte dufleuve—s. phenomenon in fact analogous to that of the 
 Rhone, but on a larger scale. We have seen this happen in 
 Yun-nan with small rivers. And I am just returned from a 
 journey to the frontiers of Szechuan and Kweichau, where I 
 have been eye-witness of some ten varieties of this very phe- 
 nomenon — rivers passing over one another, splitting in two, and 
 changing from one basin to another. Nothing could be more 
 curious, or more difficult to determine geographically, than 
 the hydrographic network in the basin of the U-Kiang (the 
 river of Kwei-yang — that river which some have assigned as the 
 line of Marco Polo's return to Szechuan). Now there is a strik- 
 ing analogy of geological formation and orographical character 
 between this tract and the south-east of Tibet. It is altogether 
 on a much smaller scale, that is all. Might not we expect to 
 find in the course of the great rivers, of which we have been 
 speaking, some such solution of continuity, which would explain 
 the obscurity which actually hangs over them ? This, I repeat, 
 is no more than impression ; I take good care to keep from 
 making it into a theory. . . . Pray make me useful in every 
 way that can help your work. I read it carefully whenever I 
 pass over any fraction of Marco Polo's itinerary. As yet I have 
 found nothing of interest to say, unless it be that it seems to 
 me the most exact and faithful impression of all that can be 
 known at this day of the acts and deeds of the traveller, and of 
 the state of the countries which he traversed As soon as 
 
 ' These are the Burmese terms for ' Little River ' and ' Great 
 River.' 
 
[loS] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 I shall have conferred with Admiral Dupre, and have definitively 
 settled my plans, I will write again. I should of course be very 
 glad of the support of the English authorities, should I succeed 
 in emerging by Assam or Nepal.* 
 
 § 32. The second enterprise of 1S68 to Avhich we have 
 made reference was that of Mr. Cooper. He left Hankow 
 on January 4, 1868, Ch'eng-Tu on March 7, and Ta-Chien-Lu 
 on April 30, following, to Lit'ang and Bat'ang, the road over 
 the high plateau, afterwards traversed by Captain Gill. Mr. 
 Cooi)er's hopes were raised at Bat'ang by the information he 
 received that the town or village of Roemah (on the Lohit 
 
 T. T. Cooper. 
 
 Brahmaputra), from which Assam was not far, could be 
 reached from that point in eighteen days. These hopes 
 were, however, speedily extinguished by the prohibition of the 
 Chinese authorities. Mr. Cooper then decided on travelling 
 to Ta-Li-Fu and Bhamo. His route beyond Bat'ang diverged 
 from that since followed by Captain Gill. Instead of fol- 
 lowing the River of Golden Sand he chiefly followed the 
 valley of the Lant'sang. He spent a night at Tse-ku 
 within the Yun- nan boundary, on the western bank of that 
 
 " Letter dated .Saigon, August 28, 1873. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. .[109] 
 
 river, where the French missionaries had an out-station 
 among the aboriginal tribes, and an estate which they had 
 purchased from one of the chiefs, occupied chiefly by con- 
 verts from those tribes, Lu-tse (from whom the name Lu-ts'- 
 Kiang, by which the river Salwen is known on this frontier, 
 is taken), Lu-sus or Lisiis, Mossos or Mii-sus, and what 
 not. This is the most westerly point that has been reached 
 by any traveller from China in the region of the great rivers 
 north of Bhamb. And Mr. Cooper appears to be almost 
 justified in stating that he was here Within 80 miles of 
 Manchd (on the Upper Irawadi), in the Khamti country, 
 which was visited by Wilcox from India in 1827. The dis- 
 tance is, however, apparently nearly 100 miles. South of 
 this Mr. Cooper reached the Chinese town of Wei-Si- Fu, 
 nearly due west of Li-Kiang-Fu, and there obtained passports 
 from the mihtary commandant to go on to Ta-Li. He 
 advanced three days further, but a local chief of a tribe whom 
 Mr. Cooper calls Tzefan, on the border of the Ta-Li territory 
 (then under the ' Panth^ ' Sultan), refused to let him pro- 
 ceed, and on his return to Wei-si he was imprisoned and 
 threatened with death by the civil officer in enlarge, who 
 apparently believed him to be in communication with the 
 Ta-Li rebels. After five weeks' imprisonment he was allowed 
 to depart (August 6), and returned by the way he had come 
 as far as Ya-Chou. Thence he diverged to the south, tra- 
 velling through a beautiful country of tea-gardens, and of the 
 white-wax cultivation, to Kia-Ting-Fu, a famous river-port 
 and entrepot upon the Min River. This he descended to 
 Swi-fu, where the two great contributories of the Yang-Tztt 
 unite. Thence he descended the Great River to Hankow, 
 which he reached November 11, 1868.^ 
 
 In the following year Mr. Cooper made an attempt from 
 the side of Assam to penetrate to Bat'ang. He started from 
 Sadiya October, 1869, and passing up the line of the (Lohit) 
 Brahmaputra, through the Mishmi country, reached Prun, 
 a village about 20 miles from Roemah, the first Tibetan 
 post, and half that distance from Sam^, where MM. Krick 
 and Boury were murdered. From this he was turned back. 
 
 « This is called 1869 in Mr. Cooper's book, p. 450. 
 
[no] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 § 33. Major Sladen's expedition, sent under the authority 
 of the Government of India, left Bhamb February 26, 1868. 
 After long detentions on the way, by want of carriage and 
 other obstacles, placed in the way of the party, it was sup- 
 posed, by the influence of Chinese merchants afraid of injury 
 to their commercial monoply, they reached Momien (Teng- 
 Yueh-Chou of the Chinese), then the frontier city towards 
 the west of the Mahommedan Government of Western 
 Yun-nan. The Governor received and entertained the 
 party with great courtesy and hospitality, but entirely ob- 
 jected to their proceeding further, on the professed ground 
 of danger to themselves from the disturbed state of the 
 country. They reached Momien on May 25, left it July 13, 
 and arrived again at Bhamb on September 5, 1868. 
 
 Major Sladen gave an account of the journey before the 
 Royal Geographical Society, June 26, 1871,' and Dr. Ander- 
 son, the medical attendant of the party, and a good naturalist, 
 has recorded all the proceedings and observations of the 
 expedition in a work which contains much of interest. But 
 there was not much geographical information collected, and 
 an officer who had been specially attached to the party as 
 surveyor' was allowed, for reasons which it is . not easy to 
 understand, to quit it and return to Burma, when they were 
 about half-way to Momien.^ 
 
 Sir R. Alcock has pointed out how inevitably the friendly 
 intercourse into which we entered, on this occasion, with the 
 representatives of a body in revolt against China must have 
 created distrust in the Imperial Government and its partisans 
 in Yun-nan, and not improbably led, more or less directly, 
 to a tragical catastrophe, when the attempt to explore the 
 trade routes of the Yun-nan frontier was renewed six years 
 later. The suspicion of foreign interference had perhaps 
 another effect, in stimulating the Chinese Government to 
 
 ' Proceedings of Royal Geographical Society, xv. pp. 363 seq. 
 
 " Dr. Anderson's account was printed by Government at Calcutta, 
 1871, /?eport of an Expedition to Western Yunan, large 8vo. In 
 another work, published in London, 1876, Mandalay to Momien, he 
 gives an account both of this and of Colonel Browne's expedition, of 
 which also he was a member. And his scientific collections have been 
 separately published in 4to. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTIOA. 
 
 [1.1] 
 
 effective measures for the extinction of the Mahommedan 
 revolt. 
 
 § 34. We pass now to 1872, in the March of which year 
 Baron Richthofen was at Ch'eng-Tu, engaged on the last oi 
 those important journeys which formed the basis of his great 
 work on China. The expedition which he projected and 
 commenced from Ch'eng-Tu brings him within the category 
 of explorers in the region which is our subject, though it 
 
 came to an untimely end. His project will be best explained 
 in his own words : — 
 
 Although my journey . . . as originally contemplated ended 
 at Ching-tu-fu, I could not resist the temptation of trying to 
 add to it a trip through the south-westernmost portions of 
 China, and to explore the mountains of Western Sz'chwan, as 
 well as the provinces of Yiin-nan and Kwei-chau. Besides 
 hoping to contribute to the general knowledge of the geography, 
 geology, and resources of these unknown regions, I wished to 
 examine the metalliferous deposits tha are widely spread 
 
[1 12] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 through them, and to gather some information respecting the 
 many independent tribes inhabiting South-Western China, and 
 their languages. My final object, however, was to explore the 
 road from Ta-li-fu to Burma. I' had some difficulty in collect- 
 ing the necessary information, but finally settled upon the plan 
 to travel by way of Ning-yuen-fu to Ta-li-fu, a journey of about 
 five days, and thence to go to Teng-yufe-chau [Momien], the 
 last place reached by Major Sladen on his way from Bamo to 
 Yiin-nan. From that city I intended to go again eastward, by 
 Yiin-nan-fu and Kwei-yang-fu, the capitals of the provinces of 
 Yiin-nan and Kwei-chau, to Chung-king-fu on the Yangtze. ^ 
 
 The traveller had accomplished half his journey to 
 Ning-yuan-fu when, on the high Siang-ling pass, he was 
 involved in a collision with a body of Chinese troops, whose 
 outrageous aggression on his party, and its consequences, 
 compelled him to retrace his steps, and to give up a journey 
 from which a richer harvest might perhaps have been ex- 
 pected than even from any that had preceded it. 
 
 The journey has since been made, and Ning-yuan has 
 been visited by Mr. Baber, as we shall see. The details of 
 his journey are of great interest, for the country is secluded, 
 and otherwise entirely unexplored ; and to me and some 
 others the interest is of a still more special kind, because 
 Ning-yuan is the capital of the valley and district of Kien- 
 chang, which has been demonstrated (as I think), by Richt- 
 hofen, to be the Gheindu or Caindu of Marco Polo, a 
 country of which, with its cassia-buds and other spices, 
 its strange Massagetic customs, its currency of gold rods 
 and salt-loaves, the old traveller gives so remarkable an 
 account.'' 
 
 § 35. In speaking of the labours and incidental journeys 
 of the Roman Catholic missionaries, we have mentioned 
 Abbd Desgodins, a gentleman of great intelligence, and who 
 has shown much interest in geography. A book was published 
 at Verdun in 1872,' professedly based upon his letters to his 
 family. It contains a good deal of information for those 
 
 ' Letters to the Shanghai Chambers, JJo. VII. p. 3. 
 
 • See book ii. chap. 47, and the notes to the second edition (vol. ii. 
 
 P- 57)- 
 
 ' La Mission du Thibet, de 1835 k 1870. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [113] 
 
 who bring to its perusal some previous knowledge, to serve 
 as amalgam in the process of extracting what is valuable ; 
 but it has been compiled by a relative of the missionary 
 without much clear acquaintance with the subject, and con- 
 tains a good deal of matter of a kind which appears to be 
 due to this circumstance. The history of the Abb^ Desgo- 
 dins is not a little remarkable, and shows the persistent 
 character of the man. 
 
 When first he quitted France as a recruit for the missions, 
 in 1855, he was directed to proceed by way of British India, 
 and to attempt to make his way to the mission establish- 
 ments across the Tibetan highlands, in order to avoid the 
 great ditour and expense of the usual journey by the ports 
 and broad interior of China. His first attempt was made 
 by Darjeeling, where, as might have been expected, he had 
 kindly relations with Mr. Bryan Hodgson, who was then 
 living there. After various endeavours to negotiate admis- 
 sion to Tibet by the Sikkim frontier, he was obliged to give 
 it up, and, accompanied by M. Bernard, an older member of 
 the fraternity, proceeded to the North- W6st Provinces, in 
 order to attempt an entrance by Simla and the Sutlej. The 
 priests were at Agra when the mutiny of 1857 broke out, 
 and spent the summer in the fort there, with the rest of the 
 ' sahib-log.' After the relief, they were able to proceed to 
 Simla, and went on by Rampur to Chini on the Upper 
 Sutlej. Here M. Desgodins was summoned back, and 
 ordered to proceed by the more usual route to join his 
 mission. We find him again at Agra in the hot weather of 
 1858, and then doing duty as-Roman Catholic chaplain to 
 a British force at Jhansi. From this he writes to his 
 parents : — 
 
 You will think I am going to become a regular Croesus 
 when I tell you that the Government of John Bull gives me for 
 my services as Military Chaplain 800 francs a month, or, as 
 they say here, 320 rupees. . . . However, when you know the 
 state of things in India, and the prices, it is no small matter to 
 make both ends meet ; so my dear nephew must not count on 
 a fortune from my savings. Moreover, I hope not to be long 
 in John Bull's service, but soon to be able to join my mission ; 
 
 g2 
 
[1 14] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 I shall feel richer there with next to nothing, than here with my 
 800 francs. — La Mission du Thibet., p. 36. 
 
 Receiving a fresh summons from Bishop des Mazures, he 
 took his departure (after drawing at Agra a sum of about 
 1,000 rupees for his services with the army). During his 
 journey to the interior he was arrested, imprisoned, and 
 sent back to Canton. Starting again under a new disguise, 
 he finally reached the residence of the Bishop, near the 
 frontier of Tibet, in June, i860, five years after his departure 
 from France. 
 
 § 36. We now come to the journey of the gallant young 
 traveller who, after being the first to open the way from 
 China to the Irawadi, had hardly taken the first step on his 
 return when his blood was left upon the path. 
 
 In the spring of 1873 the Imperial Government in Yun- 
 nan succeeded, as has already been noticed, in finally 
 crushing the insurgents who had maintained their indepen- 
 dence for some seventeen years. 
 
 The Government of India decided on now renewing the 
 attempt to explore the road, and the facilities for trade 
 between the Irawadi and China, which Major Sladen had 
 been unable to carry out, owing to the state of political 
 affairs when he visited Momien. Colonel Horace Browne, 
 of the Pegu Commission, was appointed to lead the mission ; 
 and it was settled that an officer of the consular service 
 should be sent across China to Bhamb to meet the mission 
 there, and to accompany them back to China as interpreter 
 and Chinese adviser. 
 
 The officer appointed to this duty was Augustus Ray- 
 mond Margary, a yoijng man of high character- and promise. 
 It is needless to detail a story still fresh in the public mind. 
 His journey led him from Hanko\Y across the Tung-Ting 
 Lake, and by the regions, hardly known to Europeans, of 
 Western Hu-Nan and Kwei-Chou to Yun-Nan-Fu, and 
 thence to Ta-Li and Bhamb— the first of Englishmen to 
 accomplish the feat that had been the object of so many 
 ambitions, and to pass from the Yang-Tzu to the Irawadi. 
 Margary reached Yun-Nan-Fu on November 27, 1874, 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [115] 
 
 and writing home from this point he says : ' I quite en- 
 joyed the journey ; everywhere the people were charming, 
 and the mandarins extremely civil, so that I had quite a 
 triumphal progress.' The same good treatment was con- 
 tinued through Yun-nan. He started again on December 2, 
 and on the 14th or isth reached Chao-Chou, 20 miles 
 from Ta-Li (which, as the map will show, lies about ten miles 
 off the direct road from Yun-Nan-Fu to the Burmese frontier). 
 There was some unwillingness to let him visit that city, from 
 a dread, probably real, of popular turbulence ; but this was 
 overcome ; and he writes home, on returning to his quarters 
 at Chao-Chou : — 
 
 I visited the mandarins in turn, and had a most successful 
 interview with all, but especially with the Tartar General, who 
 treated me with extreme civility, very much in the style of a 
 polished English gentleman receiving a younger man. I was 
 perfectly delighted with his reception. He complimented me 
 over and over again on my knowledge of Chinese, and . . . 
 said he hoped on my return I would spend a few days with 
 him. . . . ' I should naturally wish to see everything, if I visited 
 your country,' said he, ' and I shall have a house ready for you 
 and your honoured ofiScials when you return.* ' 
 
 The General gave Margary the place of honour beside 
 him. The Tao-tai, a young man, had omitted this 
 courtesy. 
 
 He reached Momien on January 4, 1875, and Manwain, 
 the place where he met his death seven weeks later, on the 
 I ith. Here he was visited by ' a furious ex-brigand called 
 Li-Hsieh-Tai, who attacked our last expedition in 1867, and 
 has been rewarded lately for his services against the rebels 
 with a military command all over the country.' This is the 
 man who was afterwards charged with the murder ol 
 Margary. On this occasion, to the traveller's great sur- 
 prise, he prostrated himself, and paid him the highest 
 honour. 
 
 On January 17 Margary reached Bhamb, safe and trium- 
 phant. 'You may imagine,' he writes, ' how full of delight 
 
 "■ Margary's Journals, pp. 236, 278. 
 
[ii6] GEOGRAPHICAL INTJiODUCTIOA. 
 
 I am at the happy results of my journey, and the glowing 
 prospect ahead.' ^ 
 
 § 37. After an unsuccessful attempt to proceed by a 
 more southerly line from Bhamb, through Sawadi, Colonel 
 Browne had to revert to the route by which Margary had 
 come, and a start was made from Tsit-kau on the Bhamb 
 river (Ma-mou or Sicaw of Captain Gill, ii. p. 384 ; infra, 
 p. 312) on February 16. The rest is best told in the words 
 of the editor of his journals : — 
 
 Early on the morning of February 19 Margary crossed the 
 frontier with no escort but his Chinese secretary and servants, 
 who had been with him through his whole journey, and a few 
 Burmese muleteers. The nex-t morning brought letters from 
 him, reporting all safe up to Seray. He had been well received 
 there, and had passed on to Manwyne. The mission followed 
 slowly, reaching S^ray on the 21st. . . . On the 22nd, in the 
 early morning, the storm broke. The mission camp was almost 
 surrounded by armed bands, while letters from the Burmese 
 agent at Manwyne to the chief in command of their escort told 
 that Margary had been brutally murdered at Manwyne on the 
 previous day. But for the staunchness of the Burmese escort 
 — who resisted all offers of their assailants of heavy bribes if 
 they would draw off and allow them only to kill the ' foreign 
 devils '— and the gallantry of the fifteen Sikhs who formed their 
 body-guard, the whole mission must have shared the fate of 
 their comrade. ... At Bhamo they eagerly sought for all par- 
 ticulars of the murder, but without much success. The most 
 trustwovOiy account was that of a Burmese who had seen Mar- 
 gary walUmg about Manwyne, sometimes with Chinese, some- 
 times alone, on the morning of the 21st. This man reported 
 that he had left the town on his pony, to visit a hot spring at 
 the invitation of some Chinese, who, as soon as they were out- 
 side the town, had knocked him off his pony and speared him. 
 
 § 38. Then followed Sir T. Wade's unwearied negotia- 
 tions with the Chinese Ministers, and the deputation of 
 the Hon. T. G. Grosvenor, accompanied by Messrs. Baber 
 and Davenport, to be present at the Chinese investigation at 
 Yun-Nan-Fu. 
 
 The Chinese Government had given the strongest assur- 
 
 ' Page 308. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [117] 
 
 ances that the investigation should be conducted with a view 
 to the production of trustworthy witnesses, and the punish- 
 ment of the real offenders. But the fact was far otherwise. 
 No witness of the murder was allowed to be produced. The 
 story which Mr. Grosvenor was pressed to accept was that 
 Margary had been murdered by savages ; that Li-Hsieh-Tai 
 (or Li-Chen- Kou, as he was officially designated in China) 
 had organised the attack on Colonel Browne ; that the 
 Momien train-bands had not been moved out of Momien, 
 but had stood there only on the defensive. 
 
 The manner in which the affair had been dealt with 
 showed that what had happened in Yun-nan had been done, 
 if not by the direct order, at least with the approval after the 
 fact, of the Central Government, and our Minister could only 
 express his entire disbelief in the case put forward, and de- 
 cline to agree to the execution of any of the persons whom 
 the Chinese investigation professed to incriminate. 
 
 § 39. The termination of the affair was one of the 
 matters embraced in the ' Agreement of Chefoo,' signed 
 September 13, 1876. This provided, among other things 
 (Sect. I. ii.), that a proclamation should be issued by the 
 Chinese Government, embodying a memorial of the Grand 
 Secretary Li with an imperial decree in reply. These docu- 
 ments embraced a statement of the facts of the deputation 
 and murder of Mr. Margary, a recognition of the gravity 
 of the outrage, of the ne.cessity of observing treaties, of the 
 anxiety of the Imperial Court to maintain friendly relations 
 with foreign powers, and of its regret for what had occurred, 
 with an injunction on local authorities to give protection to 
 foreign travellers, and to study the treaty of Tien-Tsin. It 
 was also agreed that for two years to come officers should be 
 sent by the British Minister to different places in the pro- 
 vinces to see that this proclamation was posted. 
 
 This is the Margary Proclamation, referred to by Cap- 
 tain Gill in the remoter part of his travels. 
 
 The agreement also provided {ib. iii.) that an imperial 
 decree should be issued directing that whenever the British 
 Government should send officers to Yun-nan the authorities 
 of that province should select an officer of rank to confer 
 
[il8] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 with them, and to conclude a satisfactory arrangement re- 
 garding trade. 
 
 The British Government was also {ib. iv.) to be at liberty 
 for five years to station officers at Ta-Li-Fu, or other suitable 
 place in Yun-nan, to observe the conditions of trade. 
 
 Passports having been obtained the preceding year for 
 a mission from India to Yun-nan (Colonel Browne's), it 
 would be open to the Viceroy of India to send such mission 
 when he should see fit. 
 
 An indemnity {ib. v.) was to be paid on account of the 
 families of those killed in Yun-nan, on account of the ex- 
 penses occasioned by the Yun-nan affair, and on account of 
 claims of British merchants arising out of the action of 
 officers of the Chinese Government ; and this indemnity was 
 fixed at 200,000 taels. 
 
 When the case should be closed, an imperial letter ot 
 regret was to be carried by a mission to England (vi.). 
 
 Under Sect. III. i., several free ports, including I-chang, 
 on the Upper Yang-Tzii, were added to those already con- 
 stituted, and the British Government were authorised to 
 establish a consular officer at Ch'ung-Ch'ing, to watch the 
 trade in Ssii-Ch'uan. 
 
 Also by a separate article it was provided that the 
 Tsung-Li Yamen should, at the proper time, issue passports 
 for a British mission of exploration, either by way of Peking 
 through Kan-Su and Koko Nor, or by way of Ssii-Ch'uan to 
 Tibet. Or, if the mission should proceed by the Indian 
 frontier to Tibet, the Yamen should write to the Chinese 
 resident in Tibet, who should send officers to take due care 
 of the mission, whilst passports also should be issued for the 
 latter. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to say that no residents in Yun-nan 
 have been appointed under this agreement ; nor has any 
 mission again entered Yun-nan, nor any official mission of 
 exploration been sent to Tibet. 
 
 § 40. Going back a little, I may record that Mr. Gros- 
 venor's mission to Yun-nan left Hankow November 5, 
 1875, reached Yun-Nan-Fu on March 6, 1876 ; Ta-Li-Fu on 
 April II ; Momien on May 3 ; and Bhamb I don't know 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 [119] 
 
 when, for I have searched the reports, as pubUshed, of all the 
 members of the mission without being able to find the date. 
 
 Mr. Arthur Davenport, one of the members, has made 
 an interesting report on the trading capabilities of the country 
 traversed by it, forwarded by Sir T. Wade to the Foreign 
 Office, October 9, 1876. 
 
 Another of the officers attached to Mr. Grosvenor's 
 mission was fortunately Mr. E. Colborne Baber, a gentleman 
 who seems thoroughly imbued with the true genius of travel. 
 
 Edward Colborne Baber 
 
 a spirit which has led him apparently to spend his hohdays 
 in exploring fresh fields and gathering fresh stores of know- 
 ledge. 
 
 On another expedition accomplished in sohtude in the 
 autumn of 1877 from his consulate at Ch'ung-Ch'ing, he 
 succeeded in completing the journey which Richthofen was 
 compelled to abandon, making his way from Ya-Chou to^ 
 Ning-Yuan-Fu. 
 
[i2o] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 His notes on the latter part of the route followed by the 
 Grosvenor mission (that between Ta-Li and Momien), pub- 
 lished by command, first made the English public, though 
 we fear only a very limited portion of it, acquainted with his 
 name. But these notes, and the maps which accompanied 
 them, have given Mr. Baber per saltum a very high place 
 among travellers capable of seeing, of surveying, and of de- 
 scribing with extraordinary vivacity and force. 
 
 Considering, however, how intimately I have been asso- 
 ciated with Mr. Baber in preparing the present volume for 
 the press, I shall do well, instead of saying more of my own 
 view of what we owe him, to quote what was said by Lord 
 Aberdare as President of the Royal Geographical Society, 
 when presenting him with one of their gold medals on 
 May 28, 1883 :— 
 
 If the Royal Geographical Society were asked to justify 
 their choice of you, among several distinguished competitors, 
 for the honour of receiving our Patron's— the Queen's — Gold 
 Medal, we should confidently refer to that first part of our first 
 volume of ' Supplementary Papers,' published by the Society, 
 and containing your ' Travels and Researches in Western 
 China.' 
 
 The first of these travels — not in the order of printing, but 
 in date — was the narrative of your mission under the Hon. T. 
 Grosvenor in 1876, sent across Yun-nan to Bham6, to investi- 
 gate the murder of Mr. Margary. This narrative, in spite of 
 the disadvantage of making its appearance as a blue-book, and 
 therefore obtaining but a limited circulation, yet ' a fit audience 
 found though few,' and made European geographers acquainted 
 with the fact that a geographical observer and narrator of re- 
 markable power had appeared in the Far East. The map 
 accompanying this blue-book was from your survey. 
 
 This narrative was speedily followed by a Journey of Ex- 
 ploration in Western Ssii-Ch'uan in 1877, upon which perhaps 
 rest your highest claims as a traveller and explorer. This 
 journey, which completed much that was attempted by our 
 eminent medallist, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1872, 
 who was baffled in his enterprise by native hostility, and which 
 extended largely the knowledge of that vast district acquired by 
 the distinguished French traveller Francis Gamier in 1868, was 
 in great part over entirely new ground, and introduced us to the 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTIOA. [121] 
 
 knowledge of several objects of the highest interest, such as, 
 among many others, Mount Omi, a notable place of Buddhist 
 pilgrimage, of which and its unique antiquities you gave a most 
 graphic description ; and as the little-known people, the Lolos, 
 from whom you brought back copious specimens of their books, 
 written in an alphabetic character which still remains unde- 
 ciphered. But perhaps its greatest value depends upon the 
 many important corrections of the Jesuit surveys in those parts, 
 made in the time of the Emperor Kang-Hi, which for more than a 
 century and a half have been the basis of all our maps of China. 
 
 Another journey in 1878 in the same province, when, following 
 the earlier part of your former route westward from Kia-ting-fu, 
 you turned northward by a new line of mountain country occu- 
 pied by the Sifan tribes, to the now well-known town of Tachien- 
 lu on the great Lhassa road, made a considerable addition to 
 the accurate knowledge of those regions. 
 
 The same ' Supplementary Papers ' also contain a most in- 
 teresting and valuable monograph by you on the Chinese tea- 
 trade with Tibet. 
 
 In all these journeys you made careful route surveys, checked 
 by observations for latitude and longitude. The maps which 
 have been published in our volume, embrace, on your principal 
 journey alone, 121 astronomical determinations of latitude and 
 seven of longitude, and the care and neatness with which these 
 surveys were drawn by you excited general admiration. 
 
 Of these great services to geography I have given only the 
 dry outlines. It is the merest justice to you to add that your 
 journeys have been exceptionally productive, because of the 
 exceptional store of various and accurate knowledge with which 
 you started on your travels. Your mastery of the Chinese 
 language, apd of Chinese customs and habits of thought, 
 enabled you to collect a great amount of miscellaneous in- 
 formation, which has been conveyed in narratives full of novelty, 
 vivacity, and sustained interest. Altogether, both in these 
 journeys and the report of their results, you have displayed the 
 qualities of an accomplished traveller in a degree of which we 
 have had few examples, and which fully justify our choice of 
 you for sharing with Sir Joseph Hooker our highest distinction, 
 even although you have, we firmly believe, only given the first- 
 fruits of that rich harvest which we expect from your matured 
 powers and enlarged experience. 
 
 §41, The following passage, describing the first transition 
 
[122] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 from a Chinese to a Tibetan atmosphere, is a fair specimen of 
 the style which makes Mr. Baber's reports, whilst abounding 
 in valuable information, almost as unique among blue-books 
 as the autobiography of his illustrious namesake — I suppose 
 we cannot say ancestor — is among Asiatic volumes : — 
 
 The remainder of the journey was impeded by nothing 
 worse than natural difficulties, such as fevers and the extreme 
 ruggedness of the mountain ranges. We quitted cultivation at 
 the foot -of a pine-forest, through which we travelled three days, 
 ascending continually until we came to a snowy pass — the only 
 pass in the country which, as the natives say, ' hang-jen,' stops 
 people's breathing. Descending its northern slope, we soon 
 found that we had left China behind. There were no Chinese 
 to be seen. The valley was nearly all pasture-land, on which 
 were grazing herds of hairy animals, resembling immense goats. 
 These I rightly conjectured to be yaks. On entering a hut, I 
 found it impossible to communicate with the family, even a 
 Sifan, whom I had brought with me, being unintelligible to 
 them ; but they were polite enough to rescue me from the 
 attack of the largest dogs I have ever seen, and to regale me 
 with barleymeal in a wooden bowl, which I had to wash down 
 with a broth made of butter, salt, and tea-twigs. Further on 
 we met a company of cavaliers, armed with match-lock and 
 sabre, and decorated with profuse ornaments in silver, coral, 
 and turquoise ; a troop of women followed on foot, making 
 merry at my expense. A mile or two further, and I came to a 
 great heap of slates, inscribed with Sanskrit characters, where- 
 upon I began to understand that we were in Thibet ; for 
 although Thibet proper is many hundred miles west of this 
 point, yet traces of Thibetan race and language extend right up 
 to the bank of the Tatu River — a fact which I had not been led 
 to expect. 
 
 § 42. In this review we have had occasion to speak 
 frequently and largely of the enterprising devotion of the 
 Roman Catholic missionary priests in the obscure regions 
 with which we have had to do. It has been the fortune of 
 the present writer to spend many years in a Roman Catholic 
 country without feeling in the least degree that attraction to 
 the Roman Church which influences some — indeed, he 
 might speak much more strongly. But it is with pleasure 
 and reverence that one contemplates their labour and devo- 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [123] 
 
 tion in fields where these are exercised so much to the side 
 of good, and where there is no provocation to intolerance or 
 to controversy except with the heathen ; no room for the 
 display of that spirit which in some regions has led the priests 
 of this Church to take advantage of openings made by others 
 to step in and mar results to the best of their power. The 
 recognition of the labours and devotion of which we spoke 
 just now has often led to sarcastic contrast of their work with 
 that of Protestant missionaries, to the disparagement of the 
 latter — such as occurs not unfrequently in the narrative of 
 Mr. Cooper ; in this I have no sympathy. There may be 
 much which the members of Protestant missions should 
 carefully study (and which some of them probably have often 
 studied) in the results that provoke such comparisons, but it 
 is a shallow judgment that condemns them on a superficial 
 view of those results. In any case, the discussion would here 
 be out of place, and I have no intention of entering on it. 
 Though it is only of late years comparatively that Protestant 
 missionaries in China have contributed to our geographical 
 knowledge of the western frontier, we must not overlook what 
 they have done. Mr. Williamson's excellent work ^ does 
 not reach our limits, as he was not nearer than Si-Ngan-Fu. 
 But my valued friend Mr. Alexander Wylie, long agent at 
 Shanghai of the Bible Society, was one of the earliest in our 
 day to visit Ssii-Ch'uan, and to give us an account of its 
 highly civilised capital, Ch'eng-Tu. His visit occurred in 
 1868.8 More recently, some of the numerous agents of the 
 society called the China Inland Mission have been active in 
 the reconnaissance of these outlying regions. 
 
 Mr. McCarthy, one of the agents of this society, was the 
 first non-official traveller to accomplish the journey to 
 Bhamb. This he did from Ch'ung-Ch'ing on foot, travelling 
 south to Kwei-Yang-Fu, and then onwards to Yun-Nan-Fu, 
 and Ta-Li, and so forth, reaching Bhamb on August 26, 1877, 
 a little more than two months before Captain Gill's arrival at 
 
 * Journeys in North China, Manchuria, &'<:. London, 1870. 
 
 ' See Proceedings of the Koyal Geographical Society, vol. xiv. 
 p. 168 seq. Mr. Wylie has now been visited with total blindness. 
 Few have used their eyes so well and disinterestedly. 
 
[124] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 that place. Mr. McCarthy wore the Chinese dress, as the 
 members of his mission appear frequently to do, but made 
 the character and object of his journey generally known. 
 He was nearly everywhere treated with civility, often with 
 kindness. ' Throughout the whole journey,' he says, ' I have 
 not once had to appeal to an officer for help of any kind, and 
 in no case has any officer put an obstacle in my way.' ' 
 
 Mr. Cameron, another agent of the same society, followed 
 Captain Gill not long after that officer, leaving Ch'eng-Tu on 
 September 13, 1877, and after an unsuccessful attempt to 
 mkke the directer road to Ta-Chien-Lu, had to adopt the 
 usual and more circuitous line by Ya-Chou, taken by 
 Captain Gill. He also followed in Captain Gill's traces to 
 Lit'ang, Bat'ang, and A-tun-tzii. He was kindly and cour- 
 teously received by the French priest at Bat'ang (M. Des- 
 godins). At A-tun-tzii the solitary traveller was laid up 
 for many days with a bad attack of fever. On his recovery 
 his further route deviated from Captain Gill's, as he went 
 further to the west, by Wei-si, where Cooper was imprisoned 
 in 1868. He reached Ta-Li-Fu on December 23, and Bhamo 
 at the end of January, 1878. Mr. Cameron's journal is that 
 of a simple and zealous man, and from his being without a 
 companion, and thus seeing the more of the people, has 
 many interesting passages. But there is hardly any recog- 
 nition of geography in it ; less a good deal than in Hue's 
 narrative. For example, the passage of the famous Yar- 
 lung Kiang is only noticed as that of ' a small river ' below a 
 place called Hok'eo.^ 
 
 § 43. The long passage through which we have con- 
 ducted our readers— or some of them at least, we trust — in 
 this Geographical Introduction must not close without a brief 
 section devoted to Captain Gill's own journeys ; avoiding as 
 far as possible repetition of what has been said in the Memoir. 
 
 ' Letter from the traveller to Mr. T. T. Cooper, British Agent at 
 Bham6, dated September 4, 1877, in China's Millions, the periodical 
 of Mr. McCarthy's Society, for 1878, p. 61. Mr. McCarthy also read 
 an accpunt of his journey before the Royal Geographical Society ; see 
 the Proceedings (August), 1879, pp. 489 seq. 
 
 2 See Captain Gill, vol. ii. p. 137; infra, p. 197. Mr. Cameron's journal 
 Diiblished in China's Millions for 1879, pp. 65 scj., 97 seq., 109 seq. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [125] 
 
 His first journey, in the north of Pe-Chih-Li, was but 
 a trial of his powers. His ascent of the Yang-Tzii, though 
 full of interesting detail, is on a line that has been de- 
 scribed by several predecessors since Blakiston. The more 
 important and novel itinerary begins with his excursion from 
 Ch'eng-Tu to the Northern ^Ips. 
 
 Captain Gill on this occasion came into the land of the 
 highland races whom the Chinese call Man-Tzti and Si- Fan. 
 It is difficult to grasp the Chinese ethnological distinctions, 
 though doubtless there is some principle at the bottom of 
 those distinctions. The races generally along the western 
 frontier are, as Richthofen tells us,^ classed by the Chinese 
 as Lolo, Man-Tzii, Si-Fan and Tibetan. 
 
 The Lolo are furthest to the south, and occupy the 
 mountains west of the Min, and west of the north-running 
 section of the Kin-sha — fiercely independent, but not ignoble, 
 caterans, a barrier to all direct intercourse across their hills, 
 and frequent in their raids on the Chinese population below. 
 Captain Gill did not come in contact with them, but Mr. 
 Baber has since supplied us with a valuable amount of 
 information regarding their manners, language, and con- 
 dition. 
 
 The Man-Tzti are regarded by the Chinese as the descen- 
 *dants of the ancient occupants of the province of Ssii-Ch'uan, 
 and Mr. Wylie has drawn attention to the numerous cave 
 dwellings which are ascribed to them in the valley of the 
 Min River. The name is applied to the tribes which occupy 
 the high mountains on the west of the province up to about 
 32° lat. - North of that parallel, beginning a little south of 
 Sung-Pan-Ting, the extreme point of Captain Gill's ex- 
 cursion in this direction, are the Si- Fan ( ' western aliens ' ), 
 who extend into the Koko-Nur basin, through an alpine 
 country which remains virgin as regards all European ex- 
 ploration. 
 
 § 44. Both terms, Man-Tzii and Si-Fan, seem, however, 
 to be used somewhat loosely or ambiguously. 
 
 Thus, Man-Tzii is applied to some tribes which are not 
 
 ' Letters to Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, No. vii. p. 67. 
 Shanghai, 1872. 
 
[126] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Tibetan, whilst it is also applied to people, like those on the 
 Ta-Chien-Lu road, who are distinctly Tibetan.^ 
 
 Thus, also, Si-Fan appears to be sometimes applied to the 
 whole body of tribes, of dififering languages, who occupy the 
 alpine country between Koko-Nur and the Lolo mountain 
 country, and sometimes distinctively to a Tibetan-speaking 
 race who form a large part of the occupants of that country 
 on the north-east of Tibet, and in the Koko-Nur basin, the 
 Tangutans of Coronel Prejevalsky.^ And in this sense it is 
 used in Captain Gill's book ; for the Si-Fan of whom he 
 speaks use a Tibetan dialect, as will presently be manifest, 
 and also (from specimens that he brought away with him) 
 use the Tibetan character. They seem to correspond to the 
 Amdoans of Mr. Bryan Hodgson, in the passage which I am 
 about to quote. 
 
 This passage exemplifies the wider sense pf the term 
 Si-fan « :— 
 
 From Khokho-Niir to Yiinndn, the conterminous frontier of 
 China and Tibet is successively and continuously occupied 
 (going from north to south) by the S6kpa ; ... by the Am- 
 doans, who for the most part now speak Tibetan ; by the 
 Thochii ; by the Gydrung ; and by the Mdny^k. . . . The people 
 of S6kyul, of Amdo, of Thochu, of Gydrung, and of Mdnyctk, 
 who are under chiefs of their own, styled Gydbo or King, sinice 
 '' Wang,' bear among the Chinese the common designation of 
 Sifdn, or Western aliens ; and the Tibetans frequently de- 
 nominate the whole of them Gydrung-bo, from the superior 
 importance of the special tribe of Gyarung. . . The word Gyd, 
 in the language of Tibet, is equivalent to that of Fan (alienus, 
 barbaros) in the language of China.' 
 
 ■' The Description du Tiibet, translated by Klaproth, says expressly 
 that the people about Ta-Chien-Lu belong to the same souche as the 
 Tibetans, and have the same manners (p. 266). Cooper, on this road, 
 uses Man-TzU as the Chinese synonym of Tibetan (see p. 174, et 
 passim). But ethnologically Tibetan is analogous in value to Latin. 
 
 ' Prejevalskf s Travels, translated by Mr. Delmar Morgan, vol. ii. 
 passim, and note at p. 301. 
 
 ° Mr. Baber again, in his printed letter, quoted from in § 40, calls 
 the tribal chief with whom he had to do, a long way south of Ta- 
 Chien-Lu, a Si-Tan 
 
 ~ Hodgson's Essays, 1874, part ii. pp. 66, 67. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTlOh. 
 
 [127] 
 
 The fact mentioned in the last lines of the extract, if 
 correct (and no one's statements are more full of knowledge 
 or more carefully weighed in general than Mr. Hodgson's), 
 would imply that the Tibetans proper do not regard these 
 Si- Fan tribes as of their own blood, even those of them who 
 now speak Tibetan ; and possibly we may have to apply this 
 to the Man-Tzil also adjoining the Ta-Chien-Lu road. Mr. 
 Hodgson, in speaking of some of the authorities for the 
 vocabularies which he gives of the Si- Fan languages,, tells us 
 that his Gydriing came from Tazar, north of Tachindo (i.e. 
 of Ta-Chien-Lu), whilst his Mdnyaker was a mendicant friar 
 (of the heretical Bonpa sect), a native of Ra'kho, six days 
 south of Tachindo. These are the only data I find as to the 
 position of the two tribes named. We shall presently find a 
 third as to the position of the Thochu, which also will fall 
 into its proper place in Hodgson's series, and confirm his 
 accuracy. 
 
 I proceed now to insert the numerals of three of the 
 tribes as collected orally by Captain Gill (A, B, C) ; * to 
 which I add for comparison the spoken Tibetan (D), and 
 the Thochu (E), from Hodgson's comparative vocabularies. 
 To these I have now adjoined (F) Mr. Baber's Lolo from the 
 left bank of the T'ung River : — 
 
 A 
 
 
 B 
 
 C 
 
 D 
 
 E 
 
 f; 
 
 I chek 
 
 
 ir-gii 
 
 ki 
 
 chik 
 
 ks\ 
 
 ts'u 
 
 2 nyl 
 
 
 ner-gii 
 
 nyS 
 
 nyi 
 
 gniri 
 
 ni 
 
 3 s6 
 
 
 ksir-gii 
 
 song 
 
 sum 
 
 khshiri 
 
 su or soa 
 
 4 zh6 
 
 
 siir-gii 
 
 hgherh 
 
 zhyi 
 
 %-i!aixi 
 
 erh 
 
 5 kna 
 
 
 wir-gii 
 
 hni 
 
 grik 
 
 w4r^ 
 
 ngu 
 
 6 trt 
 
 
 shtiir-gd 
 
 dm 
 
 thii (druk) 
 
 khat^r^ 
 
 16 
 
 7 dan 
 
 
 shner-gii 
 
 ten 
 
 diln 
 
 St4r^ 
 
 shih 
 
 8 gyot 
 
 
 kshir-gii 
 
 gy« 
 
 gy^ 
 
 khrir^ 
 
 shie 
 
 9 guh 
 
 
 rber-gil 
 
 kar 
 
 giih 
 
 rgiir^ 
 
 ^\.- 
 
 10 pch6 
 
 
 khdd-gd 
 
 cM-thomba 
 
 ( chiih or 
 \ chii-th4mb4 
 
 hadiir^ ■ 
 
 \ tch je 
 ( or ts'e 
 
 II pchS- 
 
 chek 
 
 khit-yi 
 
 ki-tze . 
 
 . 
 
 
 tch'i-tsu 
 
 12 pchS- 
 
 nyS 
 
 kh4-ner 
 
 chu-nye . 
 
 . 
 
 . 
 
 tch'i-ni 
 
 20 nyg-sh6 
 
 J ner-s4 or 
 \ ne-sA 
 
 nye-ka- 
 thomba 
 
 I nyi-shii . 
 
 
 ni-ts'e. 
 
 Now the first thing apparent here is that A and C — i.e. 
 
 » A is the language of the ' Man-Tzu ' at Li-Fan-Fu.; B that of the 
 ' Outer Man-Tzu ' there— or people further west ; C that of the ' -Si- 
 Fan ' about Sung-Pan-Ting. 
 
 h 
 
[128] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the so-called ' Man-Tzu ' of Li-Fan- Fu, and the ' Si- Fan,' are 
 both Tibetan dialects. The Lolo numerals also show an 
 unexpected amount of similarity to the Tibetan. 
 
 Next, a comparison with E shows that the ' outer Man- 
 Tzu ' of Li-Fan-Fu are the race which Hodgson calls Tho- 
 chu, and that their language is not Tibetan. They will be near 
 Li-Fan-Fu, in their place according to Hodgson's series from 
 north to south, the 'Si-Fan' being assumed to be his 
 Amdoans, whilst his Gyarung, north of Ta-Chien-Lu, are 
 probably the Man-Tzu of Abbd David at Mou-Pin ; and his 
 Manyak are Mr. Baber's ' Meniak,' south of Ta-Chien-Lu. 
 
 Again, we observe that though the essential parts of the 
 numerals in B and E are identical, the persistent affixes (or, 
 as Hodgson calls them, ' servile ' affixes) are different— ^2 in 
 the one, re or ;'/ in the other. In his comparative table we 
 find the servile affix ku in the numerals of another language 
 — a Chinese dialect which he called Gyami ; and in the 
 Meniak, or Manyak, we find a similar affix, bu or bi.^ 
 
 § 45. On his return to Ch'eng-Tu Captain Gill was joined 
 by Mr. Mesny, a gentleman from Jersey, who has passed a 
 good many years in the interior of China, and particularly 
 at Kwei-Yang-Fu, in the service of the Chinese Government' 
 
 Captain Gill had intended in his preface to render his 
 thanks and a tribute of praise to his companion for the 
 assistance which was derived from him during the journey 
 from Ch'6ng-Tu to Bhamb. And when circumstances caused 
 
 '' Thus I, tabi ; 2, nabi ; 3, sihi ; 4, rebi ; 5, gnabi ; 6, triibi ; 7, 
 skwibi (qu. shwibi ?) ; 8 zibi; g, gubi ; 10, chSchilDi. These from Hodgson 
 correspond fairly with Baber's Meniali (seep. 73 of his papers published 
 by the Royal Geographical Society). Here, comparing with D, the 
 essential part of 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, and 10 is evidently Tibetan ; the others 
 diverge. These ' servile ' affixes perhaps correspond to the numeral 
 affixes or co-efficients which are necessary to the use of numerals in 
 Chinese, Burmese, Malay, Mexican, &c., and which change with the 
 class of objects indicated. This would account for the variation 
 between B and E. China ' Pigeon English ' replaces the whole of 
 these co-efficients by the universal ' piecey.' 
 
 ' Mr. Mesny has been honoured with the ancient Manchu title of 
 Baturu, identical with the bahddur of India. Some of Mr. Mesny's 
 itineraries in untravelled, or little travelled, parts of China were pre- 
 pared for publication at Captain Gill's expense, and will be eventually 
 published by the Royal Geographical Society. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [129] 
 
 this prefatory essay to be written by another hand, he still 
 desired that the following words of his own should be intro- 
 duced : — 
 
 If Mr. Mesny's name occurs but rarely in my book, it is but 
 because he was so thoroi^hly and completely identified with 
 myself that it seldom occurred to me to refer to my companion 
 otherwise than as included in the pronoun ' we.' But I should 
 be loth to let slip this opportunity of thanking the companion 
 of so many long and weary marches for the persistence with 
 which he seconded my efforts to achieve a rapid and successful 
 journey ; for his patience under difficulties and some real trials, 
 and for the courage he showed when it was called for. Above 
 all, I desire to say how much I feel that, in our dealings with 
 the Chinese officials, the friendly relations we were able to 
 maintain with them, and the aid we were able to obtain from 
 them, were in large measure due to Mr. Mesny. Especially in 
 the negotiation for our passage between Yun-Nan and Burma 
 was Mr. Mesny's help invaluable. And I feel that whatever 
 credit may attach to the successful accomplishment of the 
 journey, a very large share of it is due to Mr. Mesny, who, for 
 the love of travel alone, gave up a remunerative employment 
 under the Chinese Government to become my companion. As 
 long as the events of those sixteen weeks shall have a place in 
 my inemory, so long will the kindly support of my companion 
 be among the freshest and pleasantest of them all. 
 
 § 46. The first place of importance reached after leaving 
 Ch'eng-Tu was Ya-Chou, the entrepdt and starting-point of 
 the trade with Tibet. The staple of this trade is the brick- 
 tea, or rather cake-tea (afterwards broken up into brick-tea). 
 Captain Gill has given some interesting particulars of this 
 (ii. 47 ; infra, 159) ; as he has in a previous part of his 
 book (i. 176 seq. ; infra, 47) regarding a similar manufacture 
 carried on by the Russians established at Hankow, for the 
 market of Mongolia. 
 
 Whilst I was writing these paragraphs a report was put 
 into my hands, in which Mr. Baber gives most curious details 
 respecting this Tibetan tea-trade.^ The tea grown for it is 
 
 ' In supplement to Calcutta Gazette, November 8, ,1879. This 
 has been reprinted with Mr. Baher's Journeys in the Siipflementary 
 Papers of the Royal Geographical Si'ciety, 1882, pp. 192 seq. 
 
 h2 
 
[i3o] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 peculiar. It is not derived from the carefully manipulated 
 leaves of carefully tended gardens, but from scrubby, strag- 
 gling, and uncared-for trees, allowed to attain a height of 
 nine or ten feet and more. Even of these plants only the 
 inferior produce is devoted to the use of the barbarian : in 
 fact, what is mere refuse. 'I saw great quantities of this,' 
 writes Mr, Baber, 'being "brought in from the country on 
 the backs of coolies, in bundles eight feet long by nearly a 
 yard broad, and supposed it to be fuel ; it looks like brush- 
 wood, and is, in fact, merely branches broken off the trees 
 and dried in the sun, without any pretence at picking. It 
 sells in Yung-Ching for 2,000 cash a pecul at the outside, and 
 its quality may be judged from a comparison of this price 
 with that of the common tea drunk by the poorer classes 
 in the neighbourhood, which is about 20,000 cash a pecul.' 
 
 Mr. Baber then describes the process of pressing this 
 stuff into the cakes or pao spoken of by Captain Gill. At 
 Ta-Chien-Lu these cakes are cut into the portions — about 
 nine inches by seven by three — which the Chinese call ch'uan, 
 or ' bricks,' ' containing a good deal more stick than leaf.' 
 Mr. Baber corroborates Captain Gill's estimate of the extra- 
 ordinary weights carried by the porters of these pao up to 
 Ta-Chien-Lu, mentioning a case in which he overtook a 
 somewhat slenderly built carrier freighted with 22 of the 
 Ya-Chou packages, which must at the lowest computation 
 have exceeded 400 lbs. in weight ! ' 
 
 The quantity which annually paid duty at Ta-Chien-Lu he 
 calculated on good comparative data at about 10,000,000 
 lbs., worth at that place ;^i6o,ooo. 
 
 A good deal besides is smuggled in by Chinese officials, 
 for it is by means of this tea that those gentlemen feather 
 their nests. Of these administrators and their gains the 
 Tibetans say, ' They come to our country without breeks, 
 and go away with a thousand ba:ggage-yaks.' 
 
 § 47. Mr. Baber, like Captain Gill, speaks of the remark- 
 able manner in which the British-Indian rupee has become 
 
 ' The/ao purport to weigh each 18 catties, or 24 lbs., as Captain 
 Gill states. But this, according to Mr, Balder, is when saturated. 
 The theoretical weight is a good deal reduced when they are dry. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [131] 
 
 the currency of Tibet — a circumstance of which my friend' 
 General Hyde was probably not aware in his endeavours to 
 estimate the existing amount of current rupees for the Silver 
 Committee of 1876. ' Those (rupees) which bear a crowned 
 presentment of Her Majesty are named Lama tob-du or 
 "vagabond Lama," the crown having been mistaken for the 
 head-gear of a religious mendicant.' 
 
 Before the introduction of the rupee, tea-bricks were 
 used as currency (just as Marco Polo tells us that in an 
 adjoining region loaves of salt were used in his time), and 
 ' even now in Bat'ang a brick of ordinary tea is not merely 
 worth a rupee, but in a certain sense is a rupee, being 
 accepted without minute regard to weight, just like the silver 
 coin, as a legal tender. Since the influx of rupees this tea- 
 coinage has been very seriously debased, having now lost 25 
 per cent, of its original weight. The system of double 
 monetary ^ standard is approaching its end, at any rate in 
 Tibet ; for in May last the Lamas of the Bat'ang monastery, 
 having hoarded a great treasure of bricks, found it impossible 
 to exchange them at par, and had to put up with a loss of 
 30 per cent.' 
 
 Mr. Baber has some judicious remarks as to the outlet 
 for Indian tea into Western Tibet. The obstacle to this, 
 as well as to the admission of European travellers, is the 
 jealous hostility of the Lamas, jealous of power, jealous of 
 enlightenment, jealous, above all, of their monopoly of 
 trade. It is evidently a mistake to suppose that the main 
 difficulty lies in Chinese aversion to open the landward 
 frontier, real aS that probably is. The feeling among the 
 Lama hierarchy is evidently very different from what it was 
 in the days of Turner and Bogle ; and judging from the 
 
 ■* Is it of any use to protest against the silly and ignorant use of 
 this word in the sense oi pecuniary ? We constantly of late see a pay- 
 ment of cash called ' a monetary transaction ! ' I have seen it so used, 
 within these few weeks, by a clever daily paper, by a literary weekly 
 paper of repute, by a respectable M.P. , and in a despatch from the 
 Government of India ! AfoHetary surely belongs to matter.^ of currency 
 and- minting, not to money payments. Both money and monetary 
 no doubt come from monela, but by diifferent roads, and carrj ing 
 different meanings. 
 
[i32] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION: 
 
 reports of both Captain Gill and Mr. Cooper, their rule over 
 the people is now become intolerably oppressive. 
 
 We must not lengthen this too long discourse, but the 
 temptation is great to draw upon Mr. Baber, whose reports, 
 whilst they convey a remarkable amount of information, are 
 fujl' of good sense, and as diverting as any story-book ! 
 
 One fact more, however, we must borrow, before bidding 
 him a reluctant adieu ; and that is his discovery (Fortuna 
 favet fortibus !) upon his last journey — see § 40 above— of - 
 two singular local qualities of tea, one of which is naturally 
 provided with sugar, and the other with a flavour of milk or, 
 more exactly, of butter ! 
 
 § 48. Ta-Chien-Lu, Captain Gill's first place of halt after 
 leaving Ch'dng-Tu, is a name that is becoming familiar to 
 the public ear, as the Chinese gate of Tibet, on the Ssu- 
 Ch'uan frontier. Politically speaking, it is more correctly the 
 gate between the 'regulation Province ''of Ssu-Ch'uan, and 
 the Chinese ' non-regulation Province ' of the Tibetan 
 marches. Captain Gill has told the story of the Chinese 
 etymology of the name (ii. 76, 77), quite fanciful, like 
 many other Chinese (and many other non-Chinese) etymo- 
 logies that find currency. The name appears from the 
 Tibetan side as Tarchenion, Tazedo or Taze'deu, Darchando, 
 and Tachindo, and is purely Tibetan,^ meaning the con- 
 fluence of the Tar and the Tsen, two streams which unite 
 near the town. 
 
 The place itself stands at a height of 8,340 feet above 
 the sea-level, but the second march westward carries the 
 traveller to the summit-level of the great Tibetan table-land. 
 This great plateau here droops southward as far as lat. 29°, 
 
 ' The termination do is common in Tibetan names — as Ghiamdo, 
 Tsiamdo — and means a confluence. For the forms above see P. 
 Horace della Penna in Markham, 2nd edit. p. 314 ; Pundit Nain 
 Singh in J. R. Geog. Soc, vol. xxxviii. p. 172 ; the Nepalese itin- 
 eraries given by Mr. Hodgson in the J. A. S. Bengal, vol. xxv. pp. 
 488 and 495 ; and another itinerary from Katmandu, given by him at 
 an earlier aate in the Asiatic Researches, vol. xvii. p. 513 seq This 
 last itinerary is obviously not genuine beyond Lhassa, from which it 
 makes ' Tazedo ' only thirteen stages distant, in a beautifully cultivated 
 plain, producing not only peas and potatoes, but "rice and mangoes I 
 But it gives us the Tibelan name. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [133] 
 
 and below that sends out a great buttress or lower terrace, 
 still ranging 6,000 feet and upwards above the sea, which 
 embraces, roughly speaking, nearly the whole of, Yun-nan.'' 
 In the descent from the higher to the lower terrace, and for 
 a long distance both above and below the zone of most 
 sudden declivity, this region of the earth's crust seems in a 
 remote age to have been cracked and split by huge rents or 
 fissures, all running parallel to one another from north to 
 south ; for not only the valleys of those great rivers, of which 
 we have said so much, but the. gorges of their tributary 
 streams, exhibit this parallelism.' 
 
 § 49. The ethnography of the manifold tribes on the 
 mountain frontier of China, Burma, and Tibet, is a subject 
 of great interest, and respecting which very little is yet 
 known. We have touched it already in a loose way in a 
 preceding paragraph regarding the tribes that look down 
 upon Ssii-ch'uan, and we should be tempted to do so again 
 in the region of the great rivers descending from Tibet into 
 Yun-nan and Burma, but for the great scarcity of material. 
 Something has been said of the MusUs and Lisiis, two of the 
 most prominent of these tribes, in the Memoir of Captain 
 Gill, pp. [28-29J. 
 
 Vocabularies of their languages have been sent home 
 by M. Desgodins, and, though I have not seen these, 
 M. Terrien de la Couperie, who has paid much attention to 
 the philology of the Chinese arid bordering tribes, tells me 
 that the two vocabularies have 70 per cent, of words com- 
 mon to both, and show a manifest connection bo.-h with 
 some of the Miao-tzii tribes and with the Burmesic. The 
 last point is corroborated by the statement of Dr. Anderson 
 regarding the Lisiis, that the similarity of the Lisu, and 
 Burmese languages is so great that it is hardly possible to 
 avoid the conclusion that the two peoples have sprung from 
 one stack.* 
 
 « Height of TaLU-Fn, 6,955 fee' 5 height of Yun-Nan-Fu. 6,397 
 feet; height of Tong-ch'uan, 7,152 feet, and height of Huili, 6,234 
 feet. These heights were erroneously given in the first edition of 
 this essay. 
 
 ' Gill. vol. ii. p. 228 ; infra, p. 234. 
 
 * Anderson, u.s. 
 
[134] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 § 50. Captain Gill, when at Kudeu, obtained a remarkable 
 manuscript, which he has presented to the British Museum. ^ 
 I have seen the manuscript, but I derive the following 
 account of it from M. Terrien de la Couperie, who is en- 
 gaged in systematic study of the origin and relations of the 
 Chinese characters, and is deeply interested in this document. 
 It is written in an unknown hieroglyphic character, and con- 
 sists of eighteen pages, measuring about <)\ inches by 3^. 
 The characters read from left to right ; there are three lines 
 on a page ; the successive phrases or groups of characters 
 being divided by vertical lines. Among the characters are 
 many of an ideographic kind, which have a strong resem- 
 blance to the ancient Chinese characters called chuen-izu. 
 With these are mixed numerous Buddhistic emblems. 
 
 M. Terrien possesses another document in similar cha- 
 racter, but less mixed with Buddhistic symbols, which was 
 traced by M. Desgodins from the book of a tomba, or sorcerer, 
 among the Nashi or Miisii, a kind of writing which that 
 missionary states to have become obsolete. ' He considers 
 Captain Gill's manuscript to be probably much older. It is 
 not possible to say whence it came, because it may have 
 been an object plundered in the long disorders of the Yun- 
 nan frontier. But M. Terrien is inclined to regard it as a 
 survival of a very ancient ideographic system, perhaps con-* 
 nected with that of the Chinese in very remote times. The 
 late Francis Garnier, during one of his later journeys in 
 Hu-nan, was assured ^ that in certain caves in that province 
 there were found chests containing books written in Euro- 
 pean characters, and judiciously suggests that these may 
 have been books of the extinct aborigines, in some phonetic 
 character. M. Terrien recalls this passage in connection 
 with Captain Gill's manuscript. And he observes that a 
 thorough study of the character, and of the dialects, for 
 which we have as yet very little material, may be most im- 
 portant in its bearing on the ethnographic and linguistic 
 
 " Additional MSS. No. 2162. 
 
 ' There is a bare allusion to the subject in the book La Mission du 
 Thibet, where M. Desgodins speaks ' des livres de sorciers que j'ai eus 
 entre les mains, mais dont je n'ai pu avoir la traduction ' (p. 333). 
 
 ■■-' Bull, dc la Soc. de GSog., January, 1874, p. 19. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [135] 
 
 history of ancient China. Very ancient Chinese traditions 
 speak of these races as possessing written documents.^ Some 
 further material has since been obtained for the investigation 
 of written characters among the tribes west of Ssii-Ch'uan. 
 
 In the transcript which we have given of Lord Aberdare's 
 address mention is made of one of the most novel and in- 
 teresting results of Mr. Baber's journeys, viz., his bringing 
 back specimens of documents in the written character of the 
 Lolo people, with two or three imperfect vocabularies of 
 their language, and the bi-script text of a Lolo song in Lolo 
 and Chinese characters. These documents were published 
 by the Royal Geographical Society with the collection of 
 Mr. Baber's papers referred to previously. In 1881 Mr. 
 Baber was good enough to send home as a gift to the present 
 writer a Lolo MS. of more elaborate character than had yet 
 been available, a document probably stiU uniqtie in Europe. 
 When Mr. Baber was in the Lolo country, a chief had asked 
 his aid in procuring a revolver. The traveller consented, and 
 requested in return a Lolo book, which was promised. 
 Immediately on Mr. Baber's arrival at Ch'ung-Ch'ing the 
 revolver was purchased and despatched, but for three years 
 nothing was heard from Lolodom, and expectation had died 
 away, when this book arrived. The MS. is written with the 
 Chinese hair pencil on doubled satin, blue on, one side and 
 red on the other, of folio size, and consisting of eight panels 
 folded like a screen. It has been ascertained that the work 
 is in a syllabic character and that it partly consists of rhyming 
 stanzas ; but little more is known as yet. A short account 
 of the book was read at the Royal Asiatic Society on 
 December 19, 1881, by M. Terrien de la Couperie, who has 
 since been giving some further attention to its interpre- 
 tation. 
 
 A further and still more important contribution to the 
 collection of Lolo MSS. was recently mentioned by Mr.. 
 Baber at the Royal Geographical Society (see ' Proceedings ' 
 for 1883, p. 447). This, a book bound in goatskin with the 
 hair on, and containing illustrations, was obtained by Mr, 
 
 ' One recalls the tradition of the Karens, that they too once had .-u 
 book, but a dog ate it ! 
 
[136] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Mesny in Kwei-Chou, and is deposited in the rooms of the 
 China Branch, R.A.S. at Shanghai. 
 
 § 51. The're must be an end to this ccimmentary. I 
 have become through circumstances, and especially through 
 the traveller's friendly confidence in me, too closely associated 
 with his work to put myself forward as a judge of its merits. 
 But I am bound to call attention to some facts. 
 
 Captain Gill was weighted with, serious disadvantage as 
 a traveller in China by his unacquaintance with the language. 
 No one could be more sensible of what he lost by this than 
 he was. Yet he was singularly fortunate, during two large 
 sections of his travels, in his interpreters — having the aid of 
 Mr. Baber in the voyage up the Yang-Tzii, and that of Mr. 
 Mesny across the Tibetan and Burmese frontier. And his 
 success on a journey in which he has had no forerunner, and 
 had no companion — that from Ch'eng-Tu to the north — 
 shows that he carried in his own person the elements of that 
 success — patience, temper, tact, and sympathy. 
 
 The first edition of this Essay concluded with the follow- 
 ing words : — 
 
 ' The anonymous writer who edited the journals of 
 Augustus Margary, with so much judgment and good feeling, 
 concludes his biographical sketch of the young man in words 
 from which I extract the following : — 
 
 ' Whether, and how soon, his countrymen will be able to 
 travel in honour and safety the route which he was the first to 
 explore, will depend upon the faithfulness with which they copy 
 his example. As soon as Englishmen shall be able, as he did, 
 to find " the people everywhere charming, and the mandarins 
 extremely civil " (p. 134)— in spite of all the serious and petty 
 vexations, discomforts, and discourtesies which met him day 
 after day, and which he had to brush aside with a firm hand, 
 but without losing temper — the route will open out and become 
 as safe to them as it proved to him on his lonely westward 
 journey. For his short story, if read aright, and in spite of its 
 violent ending, adds yet another testimony that a little genuine 
 liking and sympathy for them, combined with firmness, will go 
 further and do more with races of a different civilisation from 
 our own, than treaties, gunboats, and grapeshot, without it. If 
 the route is ever to be- a durable and worthy monument of the- 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [137] 
 
 man, it must be opened and used in his spirit, by fair means, 
 and for beneficent ends. 
 
 ' These are just and admirable words, and I think all 
 candid readers of this narrative will recognise that my friend 
 its author has been not unworthy, tested as those words 
 would have him tested, to do his part in keeping open the 
 track which Margary first explored. He has done that, and 
 more. And I am happy to think that he also is still young, 
 and thus, as this has not been his first adventure in the con- 
 quest of knowledge in distant regions, neither will it, I trust, 
 be his last.' 
 
 It was not indeed his last, nor even his second last, of 
 such adventures in the conquest of knowledge, though within 
 little more than three years and a half after those words 
 were written, William Gill had laid down his young and 
 precious life on a last adventure in his country's service. 
 
 Two journeys that have been made since Captain Gill's 
 are of an importance to call for mention in this Essay, so as 
 to give it more completeness up to the date of its being 
 remoulded for the present edition. These are Count 
 Szdchenyi's and Mr. Colquhoun's. We can give but a very 
 brief account of their journeys. 
 
 § 52. Count Bela Szdchenyi, a young Hungarian noble, 
 the son of a very distinguished father, after the death of his ■ 
 wife resolved on devoting himself to a journey of exploration 
 and scientific investigation in Eastern or Central Asia. He 
 took with him apparatus of every kind likely to be useful, and 
 was accompanied by a geologist (Herr Ludwig v. Loczy), a 
 surveyor (Lieutenant Gustaf Kreitner), and a Knguist (Herr 
 Gabriel Balint).* The last, however, was compelled by 
 illness to return from Shanghai, where the party arrived 
 •April 12, 1878. After an excursion to Japan, including a 
 visit to Hakodade and some examination of the Aino people 
 of Yesso, and another excursion to Peking, Count Szdchenyi's 
 party started on his main expedition, by proceeding up the 
 
 ■* Count Szechenyi is understood to be still engaged in preparing 
 the scientific results of his journey's. The only publication which I 
 know of regarding them is a narrative in popular form by- Lieutenant 
 Kreitner under the name o{ Im Fernen Osten (Vienna, 1881). . 
 
[>38] 
 
 GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Yang-Tzti to Hankow, and thence up the Han River and 
 its tributary the Sie-ho, to Tin-Tze-Kwan, whence they went 
 by land to the ancient and celebrated city of Si-Ngan-Fu. 
 They were able here to visit the famous Nestorian tablet, 
 and it appears from their account that it had not been at all 
 injured by the Mahommedan insurgents, as was once re- 
 ported. An inscription on the back records that more than 
 twenty years before (presumably before the visit of the 
 
 Count Bela S2<£chenyi. 
 
 Hungarian party) a pious mandarin had caused the monu- 
 ment to be 'renovated,' and erected in the conspicuous 
 position which it now occupies. 
 
 Leaving Si-Ngan-Fu, February i, 1879, Count Szt^chenyi 
 travelled to Lan-Chou-Fu on the Yellow River, and thence 
 through Kansu, by the cities of Liang-Chou and of Kan- 
 Chou and Su-Chou, so famous in the early travels to China 
 from the landward side — e.g. those of I\:tan:o Polo (whose 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [139] 
 
 Campichu and Sukchur those cities are), of Shah Rukh's 
 ambassadors, and of Benedict Goes. 
 
 Their hopes of bein^ allowed to penetrate into Tibet 
 this way were baffled, but they were permitted to visit 
 Tung-Hwan-Hsien, the most advanced Chinese station in 
 that direction (south of the Gobi desert), and close to which 
 formerly stood Sha-Chou, the Sachiu of Marco Polo. Re- 
 turning to Lan-Chou-Fu and visiting Si-Ning-Fu, they were 
 equally unsuccessful in their desire to take the Lhassa road 
 from Koko Nor. The Chinese officials and the Lamas alike 
 assured them that the only way they could enter Tibet was 
 from Szil-Ch'uan. It is not easy to discover from Lieutenant 
 Kreitner's narrative whether the party got near the shores of 
 the Koko-Nor,'but, if so, they merely got within sight of it. 
 They, however, visited the great Convent of Kunbum where 
 Hue and Gabet spent some' time, and saw the sacred tree of 
 which Hue tells such wonderful things. It is this tree, in 
 fact {sKu-bum, pron. Ku-bum, or Kun-bum, ' the 100,000 
 images '), which gives its name to the convent. The Austrian 
 party were not so fortunate as Hue. 
 
 Ascending some steps we reached the chief temple. In 
 front of it, protected by a railing, stood the tree of which Abb^ 
 Hue relates that it is the nature of its leaves to produce the 
 image of Buddha and the letters of the Tibetan alphabet. We 
 sought for such phenomena in vain. No image of Buddha, no 
 letter was forthcoming ; only a sarcastic smile at the corners of 
 the mouth of the old priest who acted as our guide ! 
 
 In answer to our questions as to the story of the tree, he told 
 us that long ago the tree really used to bear leaves with the 
 likeness of Buddha, but now the miracle appeared vety seldom. 
 ... The last fortunate person was a pious mandarin who 
 visited the convent seven or eight years before. 
 
 Next day it was Count Szdchenyi's luck to find a leaf on the 
 tree, bearing a rude figure of Buddha — apparently etched with 
 some acid. To pluck leaves or flowers from the tree is per- 
 mitted by the Lamas to nobody. The fallen leaves are carefully 
 gathered and sold to the pilgrims as a tea good for affections 
 of the throat. The tree has four stems, of six or eight metres 
 high,, and at the time of our visit was thickly clothed with 
 oblong, rounded, dark green leaves. The umbellated flowers 
 
[i4o] GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 were already in bud. Anyhow, the tree belongs to the OleacecE. 
 I take it for the Syringa of L. {i.e. lilac).' 
 
 Turning south from Lan-Chou-Fu, the party travelled 
 through southern Kan-su, by a route in large part not hitherto 
 described, till at Mien-Chou, about thirty miles from Ch'Sng- 
 Tu-Fu, they fell into the route followed by Captain Gill on his 
 return from his excursion from that city to Sung- Pang-Ting. 
 
 On October 12, 1879, two years and three months after 
 Gill, they started from Ch'gngTu, and followed in his foot- 
 steps as far as Bat'ang. Here, like him, they found uncon- 
 querable opposition to their taking the Lhassa road. In order 
 to break new ground they travelled from Bat'ang on the east 
 instead of the west side of the River of Golden Sand, rejoin- 
 ing Gill's track again near Li-Kiang-Fu, and following the 
 usual route from Ta-Li-Fu to Bhamb, which was reached on 
 February 13, 1880. 
 
 § 53. Mr. A. R. Colquhounis an engineer of the Indian 
 Public Works Department, whose zeal for travel seems to 
 have been kindled by a journey to the Siamese-Shan State of 
 Zimme, to which he accompanied a Mission from British 
 Burma in 1879. Thenceforward his heart was set on more 
 extensive exploration over untrodden ground ; and, after 
 much consideration, he determined on an endeavour, to 
 make his way from South-West China across the Shan States 
 to Pegu. With his companion Mr. Wahab (who, on the re- 
 turn voyage to England, poor fellow, sank under ailments 
 produced by the fatigues of the journey), Colquhoun 
 ascended the West River of Canton by boat as far as Pesfe, 
 where the navigation ceases, and then travelled through 
 Southern Yun-nan to the frontier town of Ssu-Mao (the 
 ' Esmok ' of Macleod, and of Captain Spry's persistent 
 agitation of twelve to twenty years ago). Here their wish to 
 penetrate the frontier was baffled in the usual Chinese fashion, 
 and the travellers were compelled to turn northward in 
 order to reach the Irawadi by the road from Ta-Li to Bhamb, 
 so familiar to us in this Essay. They, however, successfully 
 resisted the pressure put upon them by the mandarins to 
 
 = Kreitner, Im. Fernen Osten, p. 708. 
 
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. [141] 
 
 take the route travelled by Doudart de la Gr^e and his party 
 to Yun-Nan-Fu, and followed a line of entirely new country, 
 leading up the valley of the tapien River, directly upon 
 Ta-Li. 
 
 Mr. Colquhoun surveyed the whole of his route, but at 
 the present moment his surveys have not been completely 
 mapped. They will certainly be of great value, and his 
 enterprising journey is of much interest as j;he first that has 
 been made from sea to sea through Indo-China, in that 
 latitude. The narrative has been published in two volumes, 
 under the name of ' Across ChrysS,' 1883. Mr. Colquhoun 
 keenly advocates further exploration from Pegu in the direc- 
 tion of the southern frontier of Yun-nan and the Shan States, 
 in view to testing the practicability of a railway project in 
 that direction ; and it is to be hoped that he may be enabled 
 to conduct such a survey. Mr. Colquhoun's letters to the 
 ' Times ' from Hong-Kong and Tonquin, respecting the 
 march of events in the latter region during the summer of 
 1883, have been of great ability and value. 
 
 Indeed these paragraphs are closed for the press at a 
 time when the eyes of the world are turned to China and 
 Indo-China in connection with the ambition of the French 
 Republic, which, not content with an enterprise (so hard 
 to understand, so impossible to justify) aiming, so far as we 
 can see, at the extirpation in Madagascar of the most 
 promising shoot of new civilization and Christianity that 
 the world can show, is fully resolved also (it would seem) to 
 seize Tonquin. One thing we may safely prophesy, and 
 that is, that the veil will never again descend on the geography 
 of Indo-China, and that the game of conquest and politics 
 in that region, the vicissitudes of which have been hereto- 
 fore almost confined to the struggles of the obscure States 
 within its bounds, will henceforth be played by powers from 
 afar, and will probably influence the future of old European 
 Governments.