Tibet and the Tibetans / by Graham Sandberg. Published under the general literature committee.

  • Graham Sandberg
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Tibet and the Tibetans / by Graham Sandberg. Published under the general literature committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/352 (page 13)
    for hundreds of miles, as we have seen, average an elevation of from 15.000 to 17,300 feet. Its very valleys in the main territory scale 11.000 feet. Its people live and breathe and dance and sing and pray in towns and villages which rarely stand lower than ]2-,000 feet. The monasteries sheltering large communities of men or women are, by choice, erected on picturesque ledges at an elevation as high as the sum- mit of Mont Blanc. Shigatse, second city in Tibet and a great commer- cial mart, has been built 12,^50 feet above the sea; and Lhasa, the capital, is laid out on an alluvial plain 11,600 feet above the same level. Derge, the Tibetan Birmingham with a population of 6,000, stands at 12,700 feet; and Chhamdo, with 11,000 inhabitants, scales 11,500 feet. And all this only concerns the general superficies of the country; for, in the regions where it has been flung up into peaks and mountain ranges, 25.000 feet is reckoned in this land no extraordinary elevation; whilst the Passes daily surmounted by man and beast scale anything up to 19,800 feet. Yet, in contrast to these immensities, we have one town in the south-east corner of Tibet, Shikha, capital of the Zayul valley, pitched at only 4,650 feet. FOUR CLASSES OF TERRITORY. More or less, it is mountainous everywhere in Tibet; even the great plains, of which so much has been written, being traversed at intervals by mountain chains complex though not lofty. Nevertheless the ter- ritory is not of one character throughout. Both climate and configura- tion vary in the different zones included within these regions. Speak- ing generally, Tibetans classify their country as divisible into four sorts. They discriminate the Tang districts, the Bok districts, the Rong districts, and the Gang districts; and this classification will be found a very convenient one. T’ANG DISTRICTS. The Tang country is the region of the plateaus or steppes, those parts already alluded to under the specific name of Jangffang, and re- stricted almost exclusively to the north, and more especially character- istic of the western halt of the northern tracts. Eising to the sum- mit of a low ridge, you suddenly look athwart an immense plain which begins perhaps a few hundred feet below you and stretches without a break, generally a distance of 15 or 16 miles to a bounding range of hills, but sometimes uninterrupted to the horizon in a clear sweep of 30 or 40 miles. And this must be taken as the real feature of the country. We have not level desert plains as in Russia or Mongolia; Tibetan plains are more in the nature of tvicle shallotv vallegs running up on either side