country, even to the frontier of China, and are now counted, instead of being valued as bullion. They are called Piling tanka, (foreign coins), from the Hindi tankā, a rupee.
Weights and measures.—The weights and measures in use are practically those of China; the dry measures, the most commonly employed, are the bre or bo of about four pints and the bchal of twenty bo; the capacity of the bo varies according to localities. The most commonly used measures of length are the span (mto), the cubit (kru), and the arm’s-length or fathom (dompa).
Exploration.—Tibet was long a terra incognita to Europeans. It is difficult of access on all sides, and everywhere difficult to traverse. Its great elevation causes the climate to be rather arctic than tropical, so that there is no gradual blending of the climates and physical conditions of India and Tibet, such as would tend to promote intercourse between the inhabitants of these neighbouring regions; on the contrary, there are sharp lines of demarcation, in a mountain barrier which is scalable at only a few points, and in the social aspects and conditions of life on either side. No great armies have ever crossed Tibet to invade India; even those of Jenghiz Khan took the circuitous route via Bokhara and Afghanistan, not the direct route from Mongolia across Tibet. Added to this was the religious exclusiveness of the Tibetans themselves. Thus it was no easy matter for the early European travellers to find their way into and explore Tibet. Friar Odoric of Pordenone is supposed to have reached Lhasa c. 1328, travelling from Cathay; but this visit is doubtful. On the strength of certain statements in the narrative of Fernão Mendes Pinto, some authorities hold that he may have visited Lhasa in the course of his journeys in the middle of the 16th century. The Jesuit Antonio Andrada, a native of Portugal (1580–1634), travelling from India, appears to have entered Tibet on the west, in the Manasarowar Lake region, and made his way across to Tangut and north-western China; in 1661 the Jesuit fathers Johann Grueber (an Austrian) and Albert D'Orville (a Belgian) travelled from Peking via Tangut to Lhasa, and thence through Nepal to India. The extracts from Grueber’s narrative, given by Athanasius Kircher in his China illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), are accompanied by a good drawing of Potala. During the first half of the 18th century various Capuchin friars appear to have passed freely between Calcutta and Lhasa (1708) by way of Nepal. They even founded a mission in Lhasa, which, after failing at first, was more firmly established in 1715 and lasted till 1733.
In 1716 two Jesuits, P. Ipolito Desideri, of Pistoia, and P. Freyre, a Portuguese, reached Lhasa by way of Kashmir, Ladak, and the enormous journey from Ladak by the holy lakes and the valley of the Tsangpo. Desideri remained at Lhasa till April 1721, witnessing the capture of Lhasa successively by Dzungar and Chinese. Of the moderation of the latter, and their abstinence from all outrage or plunder, he speaks highly. His departure was due to controversies between the Jesuits and Capuchins at Rome, which caused an order to be issued for his retirement from Tibet. An interesting letter from him, dated the 10th of April, 1716, is printed in the Lettres édifiantes, rec. xv., and he left a large MS. volume of his observations. The next European visitor was Samuel Van de Putte, of Flushing, an LL.D. of Leiden, whose thirst for travel carried him through India to Lhasa (1730), where he is said to have resided a long time, to have acquired the language, and to have become intimate with some of the lamas. After travelling from Lhasa to Peking with a lama mission he returned, again by Lhasa, to India, and was an eyewitness of the sack of Delhi by Nadir Shah in 1737. Unhappily he ordered his papers to be burnt after his death, and the knowledge that such a traveller must have accumulated died with him. In 1745 the Capuchin mission finally collapsed after a revival had been attempted in 1741 by a party under Orazio della Penna, of which Cassiano Beligatti was chronicler. We possess some of the results collected by this mission in an excellent short treatise on Tibet by P. Orazio himself, as well as in the Alphabetum Tibetanum of the Augustine monk A. Georgi (Rome, 1762). Some fifty volumes, the relics of the mission library, were in 1847 recovered from Lhasa by Brian Hodgson, through the courtesy of the Dalai lama himself, and were transmitted as an offering to Pope Pius IX. The first Englishman to enter Tibet was George Bogle, a Writer of the East India Company, in 1774, on an embassy from Warren Hastings to the Tashi lama of Shigatse. In 1783 Lieut. Samuel Turner was dispatched on a mission similar to that of Bogle, and reached Shigatse. In 1811–1812 the first English visit to Lhasa occurred. The traveller was Thomas Manning, a Cambridge man of Caius College, who had been long devoted to Chinese studies, the “friend M.” of Charles Lamb, from whom “Elia” professes to have got that translation of a Chinese MS. which furnished the dissertation on roast pig. After residing some years at Canton, Manning went to Calcutta, bent on reaching the interior of China through Tibet, since from the seaboard it was sealed. He actually did reach Lhasa, stayed there about five months, and had several interviews with the Dalai lama, but was compelled to return to India. He never published anything regarding his journey, and its occurrence was known to few, when his narrative was printed, through the zeal of Mr (afterwards Sir) C. Markham, in 1876. The account, though containing some passages of great interest, is disappointing. Manning was the only Englishman known to have reached the sacred city without the aid of an army. But the Abbé Huc states that William Moorcroft, an Englishman who made a journey into Tibet in the neighbourhood of Lake Manasarowar in 1812, and another into Kashgar in 1824, lived in Lhasa for twelve years disguised as a Mussulman. He was supposed to have died on the Afghan frontier in 1825 on his second journey; but if Huc’s story is true he reached Lhasa in 1826, and did not leave it till 1838, being assassinated on his homeward journey, when maps and drawings were found on him, and his identity was for the first time suspected by the Tibetans. During the 19th century Europeans were systematically prevented from entering the country or speedily expelled if found in it. In 1844—1846 the French missionaries, Evariste Régis Huc and Joseph Gabet, made their way to Lhasa from China. They travelled from China the route followed by Grueber and by Van de Putte, via Siningfu, and reached Lhasa on the 29th of January 1846. On the 15th of March they were sent off under escort by the rugged road to Szechuen. Huc’s book, Souvenirs d’un voyage, &c., is one of the most delightful books of travel. Huc was, indeed, not only without science, perhaps without accurate knowledge of any kind, but also without that geographical sense which sometimes enables a traveller to bring back valuable contributions to geographical knowledge though unable to make instrumental observations. He was, however, amazingly clever as a narrator and sketcher of character. It was Ke-shen, a well-known Chinese statesman, who was disgraced for making peace with the English at Canton in 1841, and was then on a special deputation to Lhasa, who ostensibly expelled them. The Tibetan regent, with his enlightened and kindly spirit, is painted by Huc in most attractive colours, and Markham expressed the opinion that the native authorities were then willing to receive strangers, while the jealousy that excluded them was Chinese only. The brothers Henry and Richard Strachey visited Manasarowar Lake in 1846 and 1848 respectively. In 1866 the Abbé Desgodins travelled through portions of eastern Tibet and reached Chiamdo (in Khām), but was prevented from approaching any closer to Lhasa.
Beginning in 1863 a number of native Indian explorers were sent by the government of India into Tibet, for the purpose of surveying the country and collecting information about its inhabitants. These men were specially trained at Dehra Dun in the work of surveying, and entered Tibet with a strong wooden box with a specially concealedThe Secret-Service Pundits. secret drawer for holding observing instruments, a prayer wheel with rolls of blank paper instead of prayers in the barrel on which observations might be noted, and lamaic rosaries by the beads of which each hundred paces might be counted. As may be imagined, they carried their lives in their hands in case of discovery. The best known of these men were Pundit Nain Singh, Pundit Krishna, originally known as A.-K. (from the first and last letters of his name transposed) and Ugyen Gyatso, or U.-G. Nain Singh reached Lhasa in the course of two remarkable journeys. In the first, after an ineffectual attempt by Nepal, he
