Ladakh

“ The present value of the trade between British India and Tibet passing through Ladakh is inconsiderable. Ladakh, however, is improving in its trade prospects apart from Tibet. It is curious that both Ladakh and Tibet import a considerable amount of treasure, for on the borders of western Tibet and within a radius of 100 or 200 m. of Leh there centres a gold-mining industry which apparently only requires scientific development to render it enormously productive. ”

“ On the side of this mountain the Indus is said to rise at a height of 17,000 feet. After a course of 200 miles or more it crosses the south-east boundary of the Kashmir State at an elevation of 13,800 feet. From the Kashmir frontier to Mt Haramosh west of Gilgit it flows steadily to the north-west for 350 miles. After 125 miles Leh, the capital of Ladakh, is reached at a height of 10,500 feet, and here the river is crossed by the trade route to Yarkand. A little below Leh the Indus receives the Zanskar, which drains the south-east of Kashmir. ”

“ Gay broad-brimmed hats are in vogue at Lhassa, but are rarer in the west. The women dress much like the men, and plait the hair in narrow tresses hanging on the shoulders. On the top of the head the Ladakh women wear a flat lappet of cloth or leather, descending in a peak behind, stuck over with beads of turquoise, amber, and cornelian ”

“ Thus, in these three different sectors covering such the larger part of our boundary with China, there is sufficient authority based on geography, tradition as well as treaties for the boundary as shown in our published maps. The remaining sector from the tri-junction of the Nepal, India and Tibet boundary up to Ladakh is also traditional and follows well defined watersheds between the river systems in the south and the west on the one hand and north and east on the other. ”

“ The whole region lies very high, the valleys of Rupshu in the south-east being 15,000 ft., and the Indus near Leh 11,000 ft., while the average height of the surrounding ranges is 19,000 ft. The proportion of arable and even possible pasture land to barren rock and gravel is very small. Pop., including Baltistan (1901) 165,992, of whom 30,216 in Ladakh proper are Buddhists, whereas the Baltis have adopted the Shiah form of Islam. ”

“ As for the rest, they were simply Changpa tribesmen who had been coaxed in from remote Tibet by Hurdu, just as Muscles had brought in the visiting Sherpas from Nepal. By now, Sherpas and Changpas were becoming friends, rather than one group having the other in its charge. The Ladakhi, too, were fraternizing with both groups and all were so overwhelmed by the importance of the Chonsi Lama that they were ready to follow his commands. So they were given the freedom of the fabulous city until the time should come for them to return to their native climes. ”

“ Kiz, Kirusi, Kej) , 304 Ladakh ("Little Tibet") : Idrisi's description of the town of, 281 Mongol invasion via, 186 Moorcroft in, 443-4 Vigne in, 462 Laghman valley, 96, 99-101; inhabitants of, 100, 133 Lahore: Burnes at, 455 Masson at, 366-7 Lakshur (? Langar) , 238-9 Lalposh, 270 Lamghan. ”

“ On reaching Ladak, really a part of Tibet, Mr. Knight found himself in a strange country, —a land, as he says, of topsy-turveydom, where polyandry prevails instead of polygamy, where praying is carried on by machinery, where the traveller from beyond the mountains is every day bewildered by quaint sights, strange beliefs, customs, and superstitions. Ladak is still almost as theocratic a country as Chinese Tibet, and no less than one-sixth of the population are in the church. ”

“ At some little distance outside Leh are the cremation grounds—desert places, destitute of any other vegetation than the Caprifolia horrida. Each family has its furnace kept in good repair. The place is doleful, and a funeral scene on the only sunless day I experienced in Ladak was indescribably dismal. After death no one touches the corpse but the lamas, who assemble in numbers in the case of a rich man. The senior lama offers the first prayers, and lifts the lock which all Tibetans wear at the back of the head, in order to liberate the soul if it is still clinging to the body. ”

“ The people are all eyes and ears as they stand or sit for hours together, eating nuts and sweet stuff. In the crowd we see many old acquaintances from the monastery, and also lamas from Ladak, who are studying in the theological seminaries of Tashi-lunpo; merchants from Nepal and Bhotan, Mongolian pilgrims in fur caps with large ear-flaps of fox-skin, and 345 about a score of merchants from Ladak and Kashmir, in tall white turbans and black kaftans with waist-belts. The Chinese, who play the same part in Tibet as the English in India, sit in small groups, smoking their pipes ”

“ They said, let every woman have three husbands and harmony and peace will be restored, and vice be deprived of excuse. They said this was no experiment, but had been practiced successfully amongst some of the eastern nations from time immemorial. They referred to the case of the Ladaks, a highly civilized, steady and religious people of the Buddhist faith, who inhabit the lofty and circumscribed valley at the head waters of the Indus. The place will support only so many people. If too many were born they could not emigrate to a lower country on account of the oppression of the heavier air. ”

“ In the south of India the foreign element is manifested less than in the north; so that it is the south of India which exhibits the original stock in its fullest form. Its chief characteristics are referable to three heads, physical form, creed, and language. In respect to the first, the southern Indian is darker than the northern—cæteris paribus, i. e. under similar external conditions; but not to the extent that a mountaineer of the Dekhan is blacker than a Bengali from the delta of the Ganges. Descent, too, or caste influences colour, and the purer the blood the lighter the skin. ”

“ Leh, the capital of Ladak, is a little town of 5,000 inhabitants, who live in white, two-story houses, upon two or three streets, principally. In its centre is the square of the bazaar, where the merchants of India, China, Turkestan, Kachmyr and Thibet, come to exchange their products for the Thibetan gold. Here the natives provide themselves with cloths for themselves and their monks, and various objects of real necessity.
An old uninhabited palace rises upon a hill which dominates the town. ”

“ The parent Prakrit, from which Lahnda is sprung, must once have extended over the greater part of the Punjab, but, as explained under Indo-Aryan Languages, the population of the Midland expanded so as to cover the E. and centre of that province, and the language (Panjabi) now there spoken is a mixed one, Midland in its main characteristics, but showing more and more traces of its old Lahnda basis as we go W. The wave of Midland progress exhausted itself in the barren tract of the west-central Punjab, and W. of about the seventy-third degree of E. longitude Lahnda holds decisive sway. ”

“ Muhamed Isa, in his thick grey winter suit and with his pipe in his mouth, moves about, and is guiding the caravan up between the hills when we overtake him. We ascend to the summit of a hill. A white line appears, and below it a bluish-green stripe which gradually increases in dimensions. After a few minutes we have the salt lake we have been looking for immediately below us, for the hills slope steeply to the southern shore. Now the Ladakis commence one of their finest march songs in soft, melting tones ”

“ At the north-eastern angle of that frontier, the Dihang river, the connecting link between the Tsanpo of Tibet and the Brahmaputra of Assam, bursts through the main axis of the range. At the opposite or north-western angle, the Indus in like manner pierces the Himalayas, and turns southwards on its course through the Punjab. This wild region is in many parts impenetrable to man, and nowhere yields a passage for a modern army. Ancient and well-known trade routes exist, by means of which merchandise from the Punjab finds its way over heights of 18,000 ft. ”

“ With the exception of the comparatively small extent of irrigated fields, all around is bare and desolate. Looking from Leh across the Indus, is seen a tract of cultivation of considerable extent, running up into a valley, clusters of houses here and there giving it a cheerful, prosperous aspect. This, I am told, is the village of the rightful owner of Ladâk, where he resides in humble obscurity. ”

“ The first time I heard of Lâl was on a bright spring morning, one of those mornings when the plains of Northern India glitter with dew-drops; when a purple haze of cloud-mountain bounds the pale wheat-fields to the north, and a golden glow strikes skywards from the sand-hills in the south. I was in a tamarisk jungle on the banks of the Indus, engaged in the decorous record of all the thefts and restitutions made during the year by that most grasping and generous of rivers. ”

“ This little town is situated in a well-watered plain, at the foot of a mountain covered with vegetation, and about six miles from a lake which bounds the plain on the east. The route leaves all the lakes to the left, and goes by Ilgyn and Kadoun Khan to the village of Hi Ladik, built upon the ruins of Laodicea Combusta; from here it is a ten hours' march to Koniah, the road leading there at the foot of the mountains which bound the plateau of Asia Minor on the south, and which rise gradually to the southern chain of Mount Taurus. ”

“ The name Sling is also applied, in Ladak and the Punjab, to a stuff of goat's wool made at the place so called.
c. 1730.—"Kokonor is also called Tzongombo, which means blue lake.... The Tibetans pretend that this lake belongs to them, and that the limits of Tibet adjoin those of the town of Shilin or Shilingh."—P. Orazio della Penna, E.T. in Markham's Tibet, 2d ed. 314. 1774.—"The natives of Kashmir, who like the Jews of Europe, or the Armenians in the Turkish Empire, scatter themselves over the Eastern kingdoms of Asia ... ”

“ Some of the fields were occupied by beans, peas, and wheat, all growing like a happy family together.
August 13.—Made an unusually early start, this morning, for our final march into Ladak. The first part of the journey was up a precipitous ascent, and over shifting gravel, which was very trying to our already well-worn boots; and it was a relief when, on arriving at the summit, we found a long and gradual descent before us, with an entirely new panorama of snow-clad mountains extending away towards Ladak. ”

“ This is British, and, as it extends as far north as the Himalayas, it may contain monosyllabic languages, and tribes speaking them. It may present also instances of intermixture like those which we have already found in Behar—the line of demarcation being equally difficult and undefined. Difficult and undefined it really is—because, although it is an easy matter to take a portion of the Sirmor, Gurhwal, or Kumaon population, and say, "this is Hindú because both language and creed make it so," it is by no means so easy to prove that the blood, pedigree, or descent is Hindú also. ”

“ In Central India one of these safeguards is impaired. We are nearer to Persia; and it is only in the mountains that the foreign elements are sufficiently inconsiderable to make the Tamulian character of the population undoubted and undeniable. In the Mahratta country and in Gondwana, the Ghonds, in Orissa the Kols, Khonds, [222] and Súrs, and in Bengal the Rajmahali mountaineers are Tamulian in tongue and Pagan in creed—or, if not Pagan, but imperfectly Brahminic. But, then, they are all mountaineers. In the more level country around them the language is Mahratta, Udiya, or Bengali. ”

“ The few native Christians in Leh assembled in the gay garden plot of the lowly mission-house to shake hands and wish me a good journey, and not a few who were not Christians, some of them walking for the first hour beside our horses. The road from Leh descends to a rude wooden bridge over the Indus, a mighty stream even there, over blazing slopes of gravel dignified by colossal manis and chod-tens in long lines, built by the former kings of Ladak. On the other side of the river gravel slopes ascend towards red mountains 20,000 feet in height. ”

“ Our knowledge of the geography of the country is complete only for portions of western Tibet, which are subject to the maharajah of Kashmir, and have been regularly surveyed. This knowledge has been largely supplemented during the last twenty years by the work of natives of India the so-called trans-Himalayan explorers of the Indian Survey, notably Pandits Nain Singh and Krishna (A K) who have been trained to carry route surveys through regions which they may, but Europeans may not, enter. ”

“ The Tibetans afterward found out that you had entered Tibet by another pass, and soldiers have been sent in every direction to look for you.
"No sooner did we appear at Taklakot," sobbed Dola, "than we were pounced upon, knocked about, and arrested. They cross-examined us closely. We professed to be Johari traders who had run short of food, and had made for Taklakot to buy provisions. They beat us and treated us badly, until your friend Zeniram, the head village man of Chongur (in Nepal) , came to our rescue and gave thirty rupees surety for us. ”

“ Who refers to my “Results of a Tour in Dardistan, Kashmir, Little Tibet, Ladak, etc., in 1867-70,” and other papers in his pamphlet on the origin of that legend.
[7] “Dardistan,” or the country of the Daradas of Hindu mythology, embraces, in the narrowest sense of the term, the Shiná-speaking countries (Gilgit, &c.) ; in a wider sense, Hunza, Nagyr, Yasin, and Chitrál; and in the widest, also parts of Kafiristan. (See my “Dardistan,” part III.)
[8] “Yatsh” means “bad” in Kashmiri. ”