Diary of a Journey through Mongolia and Tibet in 1891 and 1892: by Wruxzaxe Woopviie Rocsnmt, Gold Medalist of the Royal Geographical Society, 1894.
This is a delightful and interesting book. Packed with information, it is never tiresome or heavy, and still the reader does not chafe under the burden of a laborious flippancy affected by some authors who mistakenly suppose that in failing to be serious they are ceasing to be dull.
Mr. Rockhill belongs to that small band of observers and narrators whose faculties work, and whose minds move, in broad airs where the rust and moth of oriental decay do not corrupt, and which blow free above and beyond the smug egotisms of our Treaty-port Little Pedlingtons.
The diarist has expressed in the Introductory Notice, his fear that the publication of the results of his travels in the form of a journal kept from day to day might prove tedious even to the enthusiastic reader of books of travel, "if such haply there still be." He need have, asa reviewer in the Jourutl of the Royal Asiatic Society has already assured him, no such apprehension. And, indeed, the day by day record of experience sin themselves interesting and valuable, has more than one advantage over the more formal construction in chapters and sections according to artificial divisions of the subject matter. It gives greater vividness, for one thing, and we seem in some measure to live the life of the diarist, to realise his fears and to share his hopes. This is markedly the case with the present work, the simplicity, candour, and dignified modesty of which exercise a peculiar charm anid the wilderness of self-advertisement and réclame that spreads its obvious wonders and its insistent beauties before the view in every walk of modern study. Also, it is something to be able to lay down a' book, practically at any point, as one can with a diary, without scruples about getting to the end of the y chapter or the paragraph.
The work under review is the narrative be- of the second journey undertaken by Mr. Rockhill in Tibet. In 1889 he had broken ground in those regions, from which, by the way, he just escaped with his life, and the account of his wanderings was given in the Laud of the Lamas, 1891. The Inter exploration gained him the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society.
The years 1890-91 mark a period of veritable invasion by foreigners—from a Tibetan point of view. The Tibetans could hardly move for them, again, be it understood, from a Tibetan point of lew. While Bower and Thorold were quitting the country, travelling cast-wards to Tachienlu, Rockhill was entering it from the north-east, and on the extreme north-western frontier Dutreuil de Rhins and his companion Grenard were commencing those explorations which were to end. so disastrously in the violent death of the former on the banks of the Dré Ch'a (or Upper Yangtze) in June, 1894.
Of all these intrepid explorers, Mr. Rockhill was, without doubt, the most fully qualified. Gifted like Bower with a splendid physique and commanding stature,
ments of a geographer and surveyor, thievery adds to the technical skill and accomplish-rare combination of knowledge bath of the Tibetan and Chinese languages, written and spoken, as well as some acquaintance with the tongue of the western Mongols; while in his general grasp of Tibetan subjects, past and present, it is probable he has scarcely an equal. The volume of 413 pages is furnished witha map of the traveller's route, an admirable index, many illustrations both photographie and by woodcuts, and four appendices.
The journey began at Peking and ended at Shanghai. Some of the intermediate Pisses were Kalgan, Kucihus, thence, flwing the left bank of the Yellow River upstream, through Ninghsia to Lanchow, the capital of Kansu; thence, in a general easterly direction, south of Koko Nen, ton point 30 miles north-west ofthe great Lake, engti Nor, and some five days' rich from Lhasa. Here the traveller's hopes reaching ''Nepaul or Sikkim from the El nese province of Kansu" were finally disappointed. In his pwn words, "when at very nearly the same spot at which Bonvalot and Bower had been stopped, my further Brvgress southwards, was arrested by the tibetans, and I was foreed to turn my face eastward." From this point, accordingly, he made his way through Chamdo and Batang to Tachienlu, where his explorations and his anxieties came to an end.
The first section of this route is by no means inferior in interest to the rest, for part of it lay through Western Kansu, a region little known to Europeans, and abounding in points of ethnologic interest. Here Mr. Rockhill made a detour to visit the settlements of the Salar, a population of Turkish Mohammedans, now living on the Yellow River, west of. Lanchou, but originally, according to their traditions, immigrants in the reign of the Ming Emperor Hung Wu, about 1370, from Samarcand, driven' thence by internal discords and being only two in number, Teading an ox laden with all their worldly goods They were soon followed by others so that there are now more than a hundred Salar villages in which live between eight thousand and. nine thousand families." Mr. Rockhill, as one result, brought back a valuable Salar vooabulary, printed as Appendix I in this volume.
Quite distinct from the Salars are the tribes of Tibetan blood, whom the Chinese call Hsi Fan, or Fantzt, or T'u Fan, while another and still different element in the found in the ru jen, oF "aboriginals," who racial hotch-potch of this part of Kansu, is
are "non-Chinese people of mixed Mongol, Tibetan, Turki, and Chinese descent." These T'u jen speak a language "about eight-tenths Mongol, the residue being Tibetan, Chinese, and to the best of my knowledge, heretofore unknown lingo, probably the original Language of the jen of this part of the Empire."
The rebellion in the North-West, now, apparently, in course of suppression, must excuse the following very relevant quotation being made ut full length. Te Fofers to the previous Mohammedan revolt of 1867, which, Mr. Rockhill was informed, "broke out' at Bayou-rong, and that the people were incited to it by their priests or Ahons. Fortunately for the government, dissensions soon broke out among the' Mohammedans who came to blows over the question of smoking tobacco, one Ahon from Hochou contending that it was permitted them, the others denying this lax interpretation of the wot of the prophet. At Tankar the dissent sion became so violent that the Hsichtai (Chiness Colonel) conceived a plan of ridding the town of the whole lot, He had the males of both factions invited to meet him in the mosque, and as soon as they had assembled they were called out one by one under some futile pretext and their heads cut off, and so some thirty-five hundred troublesome Huei-huei were got rid of in aday, and Tankar, with a remaining population of a few hundred, knew peace once more. Since the repression of the rebellion the Ahons have not been idle. Some have come from Mecca, some from Medina, some from Turkestan, and they have by' their preaching incited the Kansu Mohammedans to rebellion urging them to follow customs contrary to the recognised usages and habits of China. Thus they tried to induce the young men to let their beards grow, parents nob to compress their female childrens' feet, and even encouraged them not to wear
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.