Volume 1
Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846 / translated by William Hazlitt; now edited with an introduction by Professor Paul Pelliot.
- Évariste Régis Huc
- Date:
- [1928]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846 / translated by William Hazlitt; now edited with an introduction by Professor Paul Pelliot. Source: Wellcome Collection.
387/446 page 333
![occasions each collection of ten tents is obliged to furnish a horse and a camel. Every Mongol who owns three cows muSt pay a pail of milk ; if he possesses five, a pot of koumis [kumis] or wine, made of fermented milk. The owner of a flock of one hundred sheep furnishes a felt carpet or a tent cover¬ ing ; he who owns three camels mu St give a bundle of long cords to fasten the baggage. However, in a country where everything is subject to the arbitrary will of the chief, these regulations, as may be supposed, are not StriSIly observed. Sometimes the subjedfs are altogether exempted from their operation, and sometimes also there is exacted from them much more than the law decrees. Robbery and murder are very severely punished among the Mongols ; but the injured individuals, or their parents, are themselves obliged to prosecute the prisoner before the tribunals: the wor£I outrage remains unpunished if no one appears to prosecute. In the ideas of a semi-barbarous people, the man who attempts to take the property or life of anyone, is deemed to have committed merely a private offence, reparation for which ought to be demanded, not by the public, but by the injured party or his family. These rude notions of justice are common to China and to Thibet ; and for that matter, we know that Rome herself had no other until the establishment of Christi¬ anity, which caused the right of the community to prevail over the right of the individual. Mongolia, generally speaking, wears a gloomy and savage aspeft ; the eye is nowhere recreated by the charm and variety of landscape scenery. The mono¬ tony of the Steppes is only interrupted by ravines, by vaSt rents of the earth, or by Stone and barren hills Towards the north, in the diStridf of Khalkhas, nature is more animated; tall foreSts decorate the summits of the mountains, and numerous rivers water](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b3135953x_0001_0387.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
