Pundit (surveyor)

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Pundit was the name given to local surveyors who surveyed areas north of British India that were inaccessible to the British in the second half of the 19th century .

background

The Great Trigonometric Survey of the Indian Subcontinent was nearing completion after the triangulation series along the Himalayas were completed and Captain Thomas George Montgomerie began surveying Kashmir in 1855 .

The countries beyond the borders of the British sphere of influence along the mountain ranges of the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush were as good as unknown - apart from individual travel reports without any mapped details. The map drawn up by Jean-Baptiste Régis in 1717 and revised by Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville in 1835, which was based on information from two lamas sent to Tibet , was still the best map of Tibet . Even the exact location of Lhasa was unknown, as were the sources of the Indus and Yarlung Tsangpo . Its course and the question of whether it was the river called Brahmaputra in India were also unclear.

The British had an urgent interest in precise information about these countries for general strategic reasons, but particularly with regard to Russia's advance in the Great Game for supremacy in Central Asia .

However, these countries were closed to the British as well as to Europeans in general. On the other hand, local traders and pilgrims from the mountainous areas were able to travel relatively unhindered through these countries; H. reach their destination in long marches through inhospitable regions and passes over 5000 m high.

Pundits

Captain Montgomery's idea was therefore to train locals in simple surveying techniques and equip them accordingly. Between 1860 and 1862 he explained his proposals to various official bodies. Although the Indian government was very careful to avoid any kind of conflict on its borders with Tibet and Turkestan , it eventually agreed.

The native explorers ( local researchers ) received not only the necessary financial means for their travels, but also a small sextant with an artificial horizon and a chronometer to determine the location, a boiling point thermometer to determine the altitude, a compass with an inclinometer to indicate the direction and a prayer chain that resembled a Buddhist mala of the usual 108 but only had 100 pearls, every tenth being slightly larger. Soon they also received a prayer wheel , inside which their notes could be hidden. The pundits were instructed in the use of the instruments and practiced to walk as evenly as possible even in different terrain, so that 2000 steps (each 80 cm) corresponded to an English mile , which were counted with the prayer chain. This enabled them to secretly make relatively accurate records, which were evaluated after their return to the offices of the Great Trigonometrical Survey in Dehradun and used to produce maps .

However, the pundits were not taught how to calculate a location from the observations with the sextant and create a map from it, on the one hand to prevent invented data and maps from being delivered, on the other hand due to the British colonial view that such higher jobs could and should only be exercised by the British.

All local researchers were referred to in the reports and to the public only with aliases, often only with letters. The British-Indian government was fully aware in its internal files that the pundits' journeys were espionage . To hide this from the outside, the euphemistic name pundit was used , which was borrowed from the Hindu pundit , but otherwise had nothing to do with him and in particular did not suggest a religious or university education.

After Montgomerie had to return to England for health reasons in 1873, Captain Henry Trotter continued the program.

The journeys of some pundits are reported below.

Abdul Hamid

Abdul Hamid (Mahomed-i-Hameed, as Montgomerie called him) made the first test trip to Yarkant on the edge of the Taklamakan in the Tarim Basin in what was then Chinese Turkestan . He was Muslim like the majority of the population of Yarkant and already knew part of the route. In 1863 he went from Montgomery's camp in Kashmir to Leh in Ladakh and from there over the Karakorum Pass to Yarkant, where he spent the winter. He succeeded in writing a detailed report on the place, its Chinese administration and Russian influence, as well as drawing up a map of the region with the most important settlements. When he was warned of the growing suspicion of Chinese officials, he took the next caravan back on the same route. He died shortly before arriving in Leh, allegedly because he had eaten poisonous rhubarb. His records and instruments were secured and sent to Montgomerie, who for the first time was able to determine an exact position of Yarkant (which corresponds relatively exactly to the position given today). The Royal Geographical Society received Montgomery's lecture in May 1866 with enthusiasm.

Nain Singh

Nain Singh later became the most famous of the pundits. He came from a family belonging to the Bhotiya from the high Milam Valley in the east of the Nanda Devi , had been to Tibet many times with his father and had learned to read and understand Tibetan. The Schlagintweit brothers had already hired him and his cousin Mani Singh for their tours in western Tibet. After that he worked as a primary school teacher, which probably gave Montgomerie the idea of ​​giving him the code name Pundit , which was later used to designate all local explorers .

First journey

After training and training in the use of the instruments, the two cousins ​​Nain and Mani Singh received a three-year salary in advance at the end of 1863 and the order to go from Milam to Lake Manasarovar and to explore the approximately 1200 km long caravan route from Gartok to Lhasa . A first attempt to cross the border failed for various reasons. Therefore it was decided to let them go to Tibet from Kathmandu in Nepal . Even on this tour, however, they were turned back by suspicious Chinese border officials in Gyirong , the first place across the border. They also realized just in time that the governor of Gyirong knew Mani personally. They therefore had to return to Kathmandu, from where Mani traveled home through the north-west of Nepal and at least brought back records of this route.

Nain Singh was finally able to join a caravan in mid-1865 that wanted to go to Tradün Monastery on the north bank of the Yarlung Tsangpo and from there to Lake Manasarovar. When he arrived at Tsangpo, he let the caravan pull and accompanied another caravan that went downstream to Lhasa. These people unanimously explained to Nain Singh that the Tsangpo initially flows east for a long time, but then turns south and becomes a Brahmaputra in India. For Europeans, this was the first indication of the solution to an open question that could only be finally resolved decades later after long controversies. The caravan route was the most important link between Lhasa and Gartok in the west and continued to Leh in Ladakh. She followed the river sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, mostly using ferries to cross over. Occasionally there were iron chain bridges made up of two long, parallel chains, between which nets of ropes hung as a footpath . Ippolito Desideri had already described these bridges a century and a half earlier with the remark that he had only used them in great need. Nain Singh also reported that people mostly preferred the ferry as long as they could pay for it. After arriving in Samzhubzê at the end of October 1866, the members of the caravan and thus also Nain Singh moved to the Trashilhünpo monastery in the west of the city, which is inhabited by around 3,300 monks , to pay homage to the then eleven-year-old Panchen Lama , Panchen Tenpe Wangchug , at a mass audience . At the end of December the caravan continued its journey and moved via Gyangzê , Nagarzê , the Yamdrok Lake to Yarlung Tsangpo, which was crossed by ferry at Qüxü (Chushul) a little above the chain bridge there, and along the tributary Lhasa He to Lhasa, where arrived on January 10, 1866.

Lhasa was the forbidden city for the British and Europeans , but as a trading center with 15,000 inhabitants, it was the destination of numerous merchants from Bhutan , Sikkim , Nepal, Ladakh, Kashmir, China and other countries. Nain Singh rented two rooms as accommodation, from which he could even make observations with the sextant. He explored the city, visited various monasteries and went with his caravan guide to the Potala to pay his respects to the Dalai Lama , the then ten-year-old Thrinle Gyatsho , to whose right hand the regent sat. After a while he had to give lessons in Hindu arithmetic methods due to lack of money. Two Kashmiri merchants discovered his true identity, but did not reveal him to the authorities, but even lent him money in exchange for pledging his watch as security.

Nain Singh left Lhasa again on April 21, 1866 and returned to Milam on the Lhasa-Gartok route, partly known to him from the way there, over Lake Manasarovar. There he asked his cousin to go to Gartok to pay his debts, to trigger his watch and at the same time to measure the remaining section to Gartok. Nain and Mani Singh finally arrived at the Great Trigonometrical Survey headquarters in Dehradun on October 27, 1866.

As a result of Nain Singh's journey, the exact location of Lhasa and other places could be determined and nearly 2000 km of the caravan routes from Lhasa to Gartok and from Kathmandu to Tadum (Tradün) were mapped. For the first time, almost the entire course of the Tsangpo from its source at Manasarovar Lake to the Lhasa area could be determined. In addition, the local researcher had gathered extensive information of a political, religious and economic nature about Lhasa and the areas crossed.

Second trip, together with Kalian and Mani Singh

Nain Singh began his second journey on May 2, 1867, this time together with his brother Kalian (referred to as GK in the reports ) and his cousin Mani Singh. They hiked from Dehradun first to the east and then up the Alaknanda valley via Badrinath to Mana, the last village before the Mana Pass , where they arrived on June 3rd. There they had to wait over a month for the Tibetan authorities to open the passport, which, as they do every year, they only did after making sure that there were no epidemics or famine south of the border. The group, dressed as Bashahri traders, only reached the Toling Monastery in today's Zanda am Satluj on August 6 , where they only stayed for one day. The torrential Satluj was crossed about 2.5 km above the monastery on the Tholing Chagzam , a combined wooden cantilever arch - cantilever bridge that was reinforced by a chain bridge construction. According to the Pundit's report, it was 23 m long, 2 m wide and ran 12 m above the water. On the further north-east they left Gartok aside so as not to be exposed to suspicious questions and crossed the Gangdisê mountain range north of the valley . In the village of Giachuraf on the Sênggê Zangbo, the upper reaches of the Indus, however, the Tibetans doubted that they were really traders from Bashahr, since all the passes in this area were closed due to a smallpox epidemic and they were already far beyond Gartok, the usual goal of traders. After long negotiations, Nain and Kalian Singh were allowed to travel on, but had to leave Mani Singh hostage, so to speak. Kalian, too, soon followed his own path, so that Nain Singh marched alone to the gold mines of Thok Jalung, which he reached on August 26, 1867. They were long, wide trenches in which a stream was used to wash the gold from the ground. The head of the gold mine was also suspicious of Nain Singh, but he was allowed to stay in the camp for five days. The miners lived in tents that they had set up in holes dug deep in the ground to find shelter from the icy wind that blew over the 4900 m high plain. While he could not find out anything about the amount of gold produced, he heard that a number of gold mines stretched from western Tibet to Lhasa. On the way back he met Mani and Kalian again in Giachuraf, who had followed the river further south to the vicinity of Mount Kailash , but did not quite get to the source because of robbers. Nain and Mani Singh returned to Toling via Gartok, while Kalian first followed the Indus further down to Dêmqog and then also came to Toling via a high pass. There they parted again; Nain returned to India directly via Badrinath, while Mani and Kalian followed the Satlui to the border, then came over a Himalayan pass to the village of Nelang on the Bhagirathi , the headwaters of the Ganges to Dehradun, where they arrived in November 1867.

This expedition had clarified that the eastern arm of the Indus, previously only known from stories, was its source river, had measured this and the course of the Satlui over long distances, had provided concrete knowledge about the gold mines, confirmed the position of Gartok and a number of Information provided to link western Tibet to the surveys in India.

Kalian Singh made another journey from Ladakh to the upper reaches of the Indus to Dêmqog, which he had reached from the other side the previous year. From there he moved to Rutog in order to explore the caravan route that ran from Leh to Lhasa a little further north than that via Gartok and Lake Manasarovar. On the way over the highland steppes of the Changthang he passed salt lakes, abandoned gold mines and the Thok Jalung gold mine, which Nain Singh had visited the year before. The further way to the east, however, was forbidden to him by a local ruler, so that he moved south to Lake Manasarovar and on the caravan route along the Yarlung Tsangpo to Shigatse, where he was stopped and expelled from the country.

Third trip

With the prospect of further honors and a pension, as well as the promise that this would be his last venture, Nain Singh was moved to make a third trip. He was supposed to cross Tibet from Leh in Ladakh to Lhasa on a more northerly route and join the caravan that moved to Beijing every three years, or, should this not be possible, return to India on a previously unknown route.

In July 1874, Nain Singh disguised himself as a trader who was on his way to Yarkant with a number of pack sheep, but soon left this path behind the Tibetan border at the village of Tangtse to head east on the north bank of the Pangong Tso . Godwin-Austen had surveyed the western part of the lake a few years earlier, but the eastern half, which protruded far into Tibet, was still unknown, apart from the caravan route through Rudok. From there, Nain Singh moved east through the highland steppes of the Changthang on a route that was significantly more northerly than his earlier route to the Thok Jalung gold mines. Halfway to Lake Tengri-Nor , he passed through the area of ​​the Thok Daurakpa gold mines, which were evidently less productive than those of Thok Jalung; in any case, the shepherds there seemed to be wealthier than the gold diggers. He reached Tengri Nor and, like Kishen Singh two years earlier, moved along its north bank to the caravan route to Lhasa, which he reached on November 18, 1874 on a slightly different route than Kishen Singh. Of his twenty-six sheep, four had survived the road. In Lhasa he learned that the Chinese authorities were looking for a British spy and that the caravan leader from Ladakh who was supposed to bring money to Lhasa for him had died on the way and that the caravan had not yet arrived. On top of that he ran into a trader from Leh in Lhasa, who knew him personally and also knew about his actual job. For fear of betrayal, he sent two of his people with his survey documents directly to Leh, where they arrived safely in January 1875. He himself left Lhasa at night with his two other companions on the way to Yarlung Tsangpo. They followed the river about 50 km downhill to Zêtang in the Shannan district , from where part of its further course could be estimated using bearings on distant mountain peaks. From Zêtang, Nain Singh followed the path over the Karkang Pass to the south. He was detained in the Tawang area for a month and a half because the small tribe wanted to prevent Lhasa traders from disrupting their own trade on this route. Nain Singh finally reached British territory on March 1, 1875 in Udalguri in Assam , where the local British commander arranged for his onward journey by steamship on the Tsangpo now known as Brahmaputra .

Nain Singh had covered 2260 km on this trip, mostly in areas that were still completely unknown to the British. He had not only counted his steps, but also carried out hundreds of bearings, position determinations and height measurements, described numerous lakes and rivers for the first time and measured a section of 50 km along the Yarlung Tsangpo and finally the Tawang route to India.

The Mirza

Mirza Shuja, called The Mirza by Montgomerie , came from a Turkish-Persian family and had been in various positions in British services since 1837, first in Afghanistan , then in Punjab , where he learned the basics of surveying. He later worked in Kabul for Dost Mohammed , the ruler of Afghanistan, and after his death for Shir Ali until his first dismissal in 1866. As a result, he became unemployed and successfully applied to Montgomerie, who has since been promoted to major and from the Great Trigonometrical Survey to Responsible for the people of the trans-Himalayan exploration had been appointed.

The Mirza was primarily intended to explore the Pamir and the course of the Upper Oxus, today's Amudarja , about which there has been virtually no reliable geographical knowledge since Marco Polo crossed the area on his journey to the court of Kublai Khan in 1274 and Benedict Goës between 1602 and 1607 from Kabul through the Pamir over Kashgar and Yarkant to Karashahr . In the 19th century, some Europeans and Indians came to the area, but more as adventurers or diplomats, not geographers.

Disguised as a trader, Mirza left Peshawar in 1867 for Kabul. In the beginning of winter, however, he was unable to cross one of the passes, despite several attempts, until he finally reached Kandahar far south over the Mula Pass , where he arrived in May 1868. Despite the ongoing civil war, he reached Kabul in June, but was only able to move on in October due to the chaos of the war.

He went from Kabul over the Hindu Kush to Bamian and over the next pass to Tashkurgan, today's Cholm between Mazar-e Sharif and Kunduz , at that time the most important city in northern Afghanistan. In December, despite the wintry weather, the Mirza moved on to Faizabad in Badachshan on the old caravan route and at the beginning of January 1869 in Ishkashim, at the beginning of the later Wakhan corridor, it first reached the Oxus, i.e. its source river Pyanj . Winter was the preferred season for caravans there, as the frozen river could be crossed at any time and the Kyrgyz nomads had to leave the Pamirs in winter in search of pastures - and with them the robbers too.

On the caravan route already used by Marco Polo, he moved on to the Wakhan to Qala Panja , the last place before the Pamir where food and pack animals could be bought. In mid-January 1869, the Mirza set out on the journey across the Pamir, opting for the more southern branch along the Wakhan at the fork in the river above Qala Panja . After twelve days of deprivation in deserted high valleys crossed by icy storms, he reached Tashkurgan in the Sarikol Valley in Turkestan, today's Tashkorgan in the district of the same name in Xinjiang, China . Due to the distrust of the local commander, he was given a Kyrgyz escort to guard on the further route to Kashgar.

Kashgar, where Adolf Schlagintweit was killed twelve years earlier as an alleged spy, had been the capital of the Kashgaria founded by Jakub Bek for two years , in which fear of British spies was omnipresent. The Mirza's position was not relieved by the coincidental presence of George W. Hayward (1839-1870), a British explorer, and Robert Shaw, a tea planter who wanted to explore trade opportunities with Turkestan. Nevertheless, he was able to make his observations and even visit old Kashgar. Another trader gave him information about the nearest Russian fort, which was only nine days' walk away. In June he managed to leave for Yarkant. There he joined a caravan of pilgrims on their way to Mecca , which moved over the Karakorum Pass, but mostly on a different route than Nain Singh had before, to Leh in Ladakh. In September 1869 he returned to Dehradun.

On its almost two-year journey, the Mirza measured a distance of 3500 km, in particular the 1677 km from Kabul to Kashgar and on to Yarkant. He had proven that the route from Faizabad to Kashgar was almost twice as long as previously assumed and showed for the first time that the watershed across the Himalayas continued in the Pamir and thus separated Turkestan from the catchment areas of the Indus and Amudaria.

The Mirza and his son-in-law were sent on a second trip to Bukhara in 1872 , but were murdered in their sleep by their own leaders beyond Maimana .

The Havildar

The Havildar , real name Hyder Shah, was a Muslim Pashtun from a place south of Peshawar and actually a Havildar , i. H. a Sepoy - Sergeant a sapper unit of the British Indian Army . If possible, he should explore the way to Kokand at the entrance of the Ferghana Valley , which was then an important trading center and the capital of the Khanate of Kokand (before it was annexed by the Russian Empire a few years later ).

The Havildar left Peshawar on August 12, 1870, accompanied by his assistant, who later made his own great journeys as the Mullah , and reached the Swat Valley via the Malakand Pass and from there to Dir . The further route to Chitral led through areas where raids by robbers from neighboring Kafiristan were frequent, a non-Muslim country that was at great hostility to its surrounding Muslim neighbors. With an armed escort of 25 men, the Havildar was able to reach Chitral safely. There he learned that the paths over the Oxus had been closed on the orders of Shir Ali . Nevertheless, he made his way over the more than 5000 m high and snow-covered Nuksan Pass in the Hindukush to Faizabad, where he arrived at the end of September 1870 to find that the path over the Oxus was actually closed. Since the direct way back was not possible in winter, he returned over a pass further west to Chitral and from there to Peshawar, where he arrived on December 13, 1870.

The Havildar had explored 460 km of largely unknown route, determined the location of various places and provided important information about important pass connections, especially for the military. Montgomery's account of the Havildar's voyage was read to the Royal Geographical Society in May 1872.

The Havildar made another trip to Bukhara , but hardly anything is known about it. His third trip was the last Montgomerie prepared in the summer of 1873 before returning to England for good. The Havildar left Peshawar, disguised as a cloth merchant, on September 19, 1873 in a group of six, including his former assistant the Mullah , who accompanied him only to Jalalabad , from where he left on his own, also from Montgomerie prepared trip went. Via Kabul he reached Faizabad in Badachshan on November 19, 1873 , where he spent the winter. In April of the next year he continued his journey north, where he soon crossed the Oxus . On the way upriver along the right, eastern bank, however, his group was stopped by the local commander before he could reach the area of ​​Schignan or its main town, Chorugh . The Havildar was therefore unable, as intended, to combine its survey with the earlier path of the Mirza in Ishkashim . He had to return the same way. His attempt to get from Faizabad via Ishkashim from the south to Shignan was thwarted. From Faizabad, the Havildar crossed the Oxus again to the northwest, explored 160 km of its north bank and finally returned via Tashkurgan (today Cholm ), Bamian and Kabul to Peshawar, where it arrived again on January 11, 1875.

The mullah

Ata Mahomed, known as the Mullah, was actually a Peshawar-born, good Arabic-speaking mullah who, as such, was able to travel freely in the Swat Valley. As planned, he separated on September 28, 1873 in Jalalabad from Havildar to explore the Kunar or Chitral river. First he followed the path through Dir to Chitral , which the Havildar had already taken three years earlier, and spent the winter there. The next year he went over the Broghil Pass to Sarhad-e Broghil in the Wakhan Corridor . The Broghil Pass, as one of the lowest passes between the areas of Russia north of the Hindukush and India, has long been of particular interest to the British-Indian military. He then followed the caravan route through the Little Pamir to Tashkurgan in the Sarikol Valley in Turkestan in what is now Xinjiang, China, and finally reached Yarkant. From there he returned to Leh in Ladakh over the Karakorum Pass.

After a year of recovery, the mullah was commissioned to explore the course of the Indus north of Attock . The course of the river in the Punjab Plain to the Indian Ocean was known and the course from its source at Lake Manasarovar through the Karakoram to Gilgit had been explored, but the part of Gilgit was through its huge gorges to the foot of the Karakoram completely unknown. The distance along the river was more than 400 km on difficult paths through dangerous gorges. A year later he was still exploring various side valleys of the Indus in the area of ​​Gilgit and returned to Peshawar in October 1876, also on largely unknown routes. A year later he took trips to explore the Swat valley and its side valleys. In 1888 he appears to have been on a secret mission to Afghanistan.

AK alias Kishen Singh

AK's first trip

Kishen Singh, known as AK or Krishna , was a cousin of Nain Singh and also came from the Milam Valley in the east of Nanda Devi. Montgomerie commissioned him to explore the region north of the Transhimalaya, which was completely unknown except for the route explored by Nain and Kalian. In the summer of 1871 Kishen Singh set out with four companions to Lake Manasarovar, but had to avoid robbers far to the east and finally reached Shigatse in November 1871. From there they followed with fifty sheep, which were used as pack animals and food supplies North towards Tengri Nor or Nam Co Lake. At first they passed a number of monasteries, but at a higher altitude they saw only a few nomad tents. On January 13, 1872, they reached the lake at an altitude of more than 4700 m, which was completely frozen over despite its salt content. Kishen Singh decided to circle the lake once, which took two weeks. Further north, they soon reached a body of water known as Bul or Borax Lake. Borax was a sought-after mineral at that time, which the Tibetans used as a spice for tea and meat, but also for washing. Kishen Singh's intention to venture further north and perhaps reach China was thwarted by robbers who barely left enough supplies to reach Lhasa, starved. Nevertheless, Kishen Singh counted his steps incessantly, even if they were a little shorter from weakness. After further difficulties they managed to return to Dehradun via Gartok, where they arrived in the summer of 1872.

Even if the trip did not have the hoped-for success, a distance of over 500 km was measured, a number of localizations and bearings were carried out and information about the population, the paths and the lakes were collected, and evidence was provided that there was a north of the Yarlung Tsangpo another high mountain range, the later so-called Transhimalaya.

Forsyth Mission - AK's second trip

After Jakub Beg prevailed against the Chinese in 1867 and proclaimed himself Emir of Kashgar , the British hoped for a benevolent buffer state against Russia, which was expanding in the Great Game, and for an improvement in trade relations. Jakub Bey had signed a treaty with the advancing Russians in 1872, but when relations soon deteriorated, he invited the British to negotiate in Yarkant in 1873 . A larger delegation was assigned the mission, led by T. Douglas Forsyth. The delegation also included Captain Trotter and some Pundits, u. a. Nain Singh, AK and Kalian Singh. She moved in different groups on separate routes over the Karakoram to Yarkant and on December 4, 1873 reached Kashgar , the new seat of government of the emir. On the sidelines of the negotiations, a group was allowed to explore the path to the Torugart Pass in Tian Shan and Lake Chatyrköl , a mountain lake just behind the pass. Another went to Maralbexi , about 190 km east of Kasgar on the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert, and a few kilometers further on the road to Aksu before she had to turn back due to lack of time. On February 2, 1874, the emir signed the trade agreement. Because of the wintry conditions, they did not leave Kashgar until March 17, 1874. A group went via Tashkurgan in the Sarikol Valley, today's Taxkorgan and over the Little Pamir into the Wakhan , but learned in Qala Panja that the Afghan emir Schir Ali die Refused permission to return via Kabul. Members of the group had meanwhile explored the ascent to Broghol Pass over the Hindukush and to the Great Pamir. Finally, the group returned via the Great Pamir and Lake Victoria ( Zorkulsee ), the source of the Oxus and Amu Darya , on a new route to Yarkant and finally to Leh.

In the meantime AK had made its way from Yarkant to Hotan on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. It determined its location, made a site plan of the place and moved on via Keriya to the sorghak gold fields, which, however, appeared unimpressive. Finally he took the southern caravan route in Keriya, which ran through the Kunlun Mountains, over the Changthang and the Pangong Tso to Leh. On the way over the Changthang he didn’t meet a single other traveler, nor did he find any inhabited villages, only a few dilapidated huts. At the end of July 1874, Kishen Singh returned to Leh.

AK's third trip

AK's third and final trip was 4500 km and took four and a half years. It was the longest journey of all pundits sent by the Survey of India. AK left Darjeeling on April 24, 1878 for Lhasa . Due to the illness of one of his two companions, he soon had to take a break, so that it took him more than four months to travel via Gyantse . He crossed the Tsangpo on the Chagsam Bridge , the chain bridge that Nain Singh had thought to be too unsafe twelve years earlier, so that he preferred the ferry. AK reached Lhasa on September 5, 1878. Since he could not find a caravan to Mongolia , he stayed in Lhasa for over a year, but used the time to describe the city and its inhabitants in detail and to draw up a detailed map of the city. On September 17, 1878, he finally found a caravan heading north to join. In order to avoid predators, a less frequented route was taken that led about two days' journey east past Tengri Nor . From then on, Kishen Singh was in a region about which the British had no information. This part of the Changthang was practically deserted and the animals struggled to find enough grass. On October 25, 1878, the first mountains of the Kunlun mountain range were reached. On the north side there would finally have been enough grass again, but the caravan was attacked by a larger band of robbers who took all valuable animals and objects with them. While the Mongols dispersed to their home villages, the Tibetans preferred to return to Lhasa. However, AK was determined to move on to the Chinese province of Qinghai with two of his companions . They moved through the march-like salt marshes in the southeastern part of the Qaidam basin to a freshwater lake, where they had to look after the camels of a Tibetan lama during the winter for lack of money. The next spring they moved further north-west along the Qaidam Basin to a place where they stayed until July 1879 in the hope of finding a caravan to Lop Nor . One of AK's companions, who had repeatedly proposed in vain to return to India, disappeared one day in an unobserved moment with all the pack animals and almost all money, so that AK and his remaining companion had to hire themselves out as goat and horse herders for several months. Despite its precarious position, AK was determined to go further north.

On January 6, 1881, he reached Dunhuang , the old oasis town at the intersection of the Silk Road and the caravan route from Lhasa to Mongolia, through which Marco Polo probably passed and in 1607 the Portuguese Jesuit and explorer Benedikt Goës died. Without the British or AK being able to know about it, both Count Béla Széchenyi and Prschewalski were on their research trips to Dunhuang in 1879 .

AK stayed in Dunhuang for only a few days. When he set out for Lop Nor with a group of traders , he and his companion were brought before the governor, who explained that he thought they were either spies or thieves. In any case, they would have to stay in Dunhuang until they could provide security for proper conduct. AK had to sell its horses and work as a greengrocer for months. Eventually he got sick too. His luck was a lama from a monastery nearly a thousand miles further south, who persuaded the governor to allow AK and his companion to follow him as servants on his return journey. In August 1881 they began their return journey in a south-easterly direction to Tosun Nor, which they reached on September 17th. AK had to ride part of the way in order to escape possible robbers. Since he could no longer count his steps, he counted how often the horse stepped on his right front hoof and estimated the length of such a horse step. From Tosun Nor it went directly south over the Kunlun to the highlands of the Changthang. They crossed the upper reaches of the Yellow River at a ford and reached the small monastery Thubden Gompa on October 21, 1881, where they had to wait almost two months for their reward from the lama. AK succeeded in taking width and height measurements again for the first time in a year. On December 16, 1881, they were able to leave again with a letter from the Lama to an influential acquaintance in Jyekundo, today's Gyêgu in the Yushu district . This letter enabled them to join a caravan as servants that went to Tachienlu or Dartsedo, today's Kangding in Sichuan , more than six hundred kilometers away . This trip was comparatively relaxing, there was plenty of grass and water, even wood to make a fire and, above all, no robbers. They arrived on February 5, 1882 in Kangding, a town on the border between the Tibetan and Chinese population areas, where the tea delivered by porter caravans from China was transferred to yak caravans that went to Lhasa and on to Kashmir pulled.

General Walker had given AK a letter of recommendation to the Jesuit mission in Tachienlu, where he asked Bishop Biet for the best way forward, but was too reluctant to ask for a loan. Bishop Biet advised him to go west to Darjeeling and not try the route across the Chinese coast. Bishop Biet also sent a letter to Abbé Desgodins, who was in India, asking him to inform General Walker that AK was on his way home. This was the first message about Kishen Singh that General Walker had received in four years.

AK and his companion left Kangding on February 16, 1882 and, following the advice of the bishop, marched via Litang , one of the highest places in the world, to Batang on the east bank of the Jinsha Jiang , as the Yangtze River is called here. There was a monastery in the village with a thousand monks. They crossed the river on a ferry and came to the area in which the Yangtze, the Mekong and the Saluen flow south in steep valleys close together. The Mekong was crossed with the help of a leather rope stretched from the higher bank on one side to the lower bank on the other. The travelers tied a rope around the belly to which a wooden hook was attached, which was hooked into the leather rope. This allowed them to slide along the leather rope to the other bank. The Saluen was crossed in a more modern way. A kind of flat boat was tied to a rope across the river, which the ferrymen oars to bring to the other side.

Before they crossed the Mekong, they had left the great caravan route to Lhasa to head south-west through the mountains and along the Lohit to Assam. When they were only around 50 km from the Indian border on May 23, 1882, they had to turn back, however, as the Mishmis who dominated this area and the trade through it had a reputation for killing every intruder. They therefore had to move north to the great caravan route to Lhasa. This path led east along a ridge that was nowhere interrupted by a river. On October 8, they reached Zetang in Shannan District , which Naing Singh had already visited at the end of his third trip, with some difficulty . AK was told of an iron bridge over the Yarlung Tsangpo near the town, which was destroyed by lightning. They finally returned via Gyantse on the way to India, which AK had already taken on its way to Lhasa, and reached Darjeeling on November 12, 1882.

Without counting the route from Darjeeling to Tibet, the journey covered around 4500 km, a large part of which was completely unknown to the British until then. Kishen Singh had managed to get all of his records and equipment back to India despite a robbery and repeated arrests. Kishen Singh's observations have been widely praised for their accuracy and reliability. His forced return from the Mishmis area to the north along the ridge was not the final proof, but a very strong indication that the Tibetan Yarlung Tsangpo does not flow through Burma as an Irrawaddy , but is actually the upper reaches of the Indian Brahmaputra .

General Walker read his report on AK's successes at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on December 8, 1884, in which the trip of the Pundit AK was particularly praised. Kishen Singh received a gold medal from the Italian Geographical Society and a gold medal awarded to him in 1886 by Ferdinand de Lesseps , President of the Société de geographie de Paris .

Kishen Singh received a salary as a member of the Trans Himalaya Explorers until 1885 and then retired to live on the income from a village that was awarded to him.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ La Chine la Tartarie Chinoise et le Thibet
  2. ^ Clements R. Markham: A Memoir on the Indian Surveys . (PDF; 60.6 MB) 2nd edition WH Allen & Co., London 1878. Digitized at archive.org
  3. ↑ Derek Waller: The Pundits . The University Press of Kentucky, Kentucky 1990, ISBN 0-8131-1666-X
  4. ↑ Montgomerie came up with this name when Nain Singh, an elementary school teacher, was sent on his first trip.
  5. ↑ Thomas George Montgomerie: On the Geographical Position of Yarkund and other places in Central Asia. In: Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, no. X , May 14, 1866, pp. 162-165 ( digitized from JSTOR).
  6. ↑ Kirong at Markham and Waller
  7. ↑ Also: Tradum, Tradon, Tadum, Zhabdun, Zhadong
  8. ↑ In order to get permission to go with the caravan to Lake Manasarovar, Nain Singh had promised on death penalty not to go to Lhasa.
  9. ↑ Remnants of the bridge are still present next to the modern road bridge.
  10. ↑ Sven Hedin first came to the mouth of the Indus in 1907 on his transhimalayan journey.
  11. ↑ Mirza was the name originally coming from Persia for a prince or higher noblewoman and was later often part of the name.
  12. ^ Official in charge trans-Himalayan exploring parties