Abstract
“THE public which concerns itself about Tibet is a very small public indeed,” says Sir Thomas Holdich in the volume he has compiled for “The Story of Exploration” series, and to this we may add that public interest in that country is not likely to be increased by such unsympathetic treatment as the subject receives in this book. The story of geographical achievement in Tibet, and especi ally of the attempts to reach the jealously guarded capital of the then closed land, was for many years one of the most fascinating interest, and now in the light of the more precise information that has recently been made available it could well afford re-telling as an instructive record of great daring and tenacity of purpose. In professing to supply such a summary, however, the present account is disappointing in that its information is neither very trustworthy nor up-to-date. The author does not appear to have any personal knowledge of the country, nor has he made himself sufficiently acquainted with what has been written on the subject, with the result that his book betrays frequent inaccuracies, and a lack of clear perspective that is rather bewildering to the reader. The narrative is made up for the most part of quotations from the reports of the more or less illiterate native surveyors, whose accounts, we are here told, although “the best and most important of all the stirring records of that remarkable country, have never yet seen the light”; whereas, as is well known, all those reports which were possessed of sufficient interest, including the best of them, namely, that by A-K, were published many years ago.
Tibet, the Mysterious.
By Sir Thomas Holdich Pp. ix + 356; illustrated. (London: Alston Rivers, Ltd., 1906.) Price 7s. 6d. net.
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W., L. Tibet, the Mysterious . Nature 76, 346–347 (1907). https://doi.org/10.1038/076346a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/076346a0
