[Captain Gill Left Ch'eng-Tu On The 10th July, 1877,
And Reached Ya-Chau On The 14th, A Distance Of 75 Miles.
- H. C] (Ritter,
IV.
190 seqq.; Cooper, pp. 164-173; Richthofen in Verhandl. Ges. f.
Erdk. zu Berlin, 1874, p. 35.)
Tibet was always reckoned as a part of the Empire of the Mongol Kaans in
the period of their greatness, but it is not very clear how it came under
subjection to them. No conquest of Tibet by their armies appears to be
related by either the Mahomedan or the Chinese historians. Yet it is
alluded to by Plano Carpini, who ascribes the achievement to an unnamed son
of Chinghiz, and narrated by Sanang Setzen, who says that the King of Tibet
submitted without fighting when Chinghiz invaded his country in the year of
the Panther (1206). During the reign of Mangku Kaan, indeed, Uriangkadai,
an eminent Mongol general [son of Subudai] who had accompanied Prince
Kublai in 1253 against Yunnan, did in the following year direct his arms
against the Tibetans. But this campaign, that no doubt to which the text
alludes as "the wars of Mangu Kaan," appears to have occupied only a part
of one season, and was certainly confined to the parts of Tibet on the
frontiers of Yunnan and Sze-ch'wan. ["In the Yuen-shi, Tibet is mentioned
under different names. Sometimes the Chinese history of the Mongols uses
the ancient name T'u-fan. In the Annals, s.a. 1251, we read: 'Mangu
Khan entrusted Ho-li-dan with the command of the troops against
T'u-fan." Sub anno 1254 it is stated that Kublai (who at that time was
still the heir-apparent), after subduing the tribes of Yun-nan, entered
T'u-fan, when So-ho-to, the ruler of the country, surrendered. Again,
s.a. 1275: 'The prince Al-lu-chi (seventh son of Kublai) led an
expedition to T'u-fan.' In chap, ccii., biography of Ba-sz'-ba, the
Lama priest who invented Kublai's official alphabet, it is stated that this
Lama was a native of Sa-sz'-kia in T'u-fan. (Bretschneider, Med Res.
II. p. 23.) - H.C.] Koeppen seems to consider it certain that there was no
actual conquest of Tibet, and that Kublai extended his authority over it
only by diplomacy and the politic handling of the spiritual potentates who
had for several generations in Tibet been the real rulers of the country.
It is certain that Chinese history attributes the organisation of civil
administration in Tibet to Kublai. Mati Dhwaja, a young and able member of
the family which held the hereditary primacy of the Satya [Sakya] convent,
and occupied the most influential position in Tibet, was formerly
recognised by the Emperor as the head of the Lamaite Church and as the
tributary Ruler of Tibet. He is the same person that we have already (vol.
i. p. 28) mentioned as the Passepa or Bashpah Lama, the inventor of
Kublai's official alphabet. (Carpini, 658, 709; D'Avezac, 564; S.
Setzen, 89; D'Ohsson, II. 317; Koeppen, II. 96; Amyot, XIV. 128.)
With the caution that Marco's Travels in Tibet were limited to the same
mountainous country on the frontier of Sze-ch'wan, we defer further
geographical comment till he brings us to Yunnan.
NOTE 2. - Marco exaggerates a little about the bamboos; but before
gunpowder became familiar, no sharp explosive sounds of this kind were
known to ordinary experience, and exaggeration was natural. I have been
close to a bamboo jungle on fire. There was a great deal of noise
comparable to musketry; but the bamboos were not of the large kind here
spoken of. The Hon. Robert Lindsay, describing his elephant-catching in
Silhet, says: "At night each man lights a fire at his post, and furnishes
himself with a dozen joints of the large bamboo, one of which he
occasionally throws into the fire, and the air it contains being rarefied
by the heat, it explodes with a report as loud as a musket." (Lives of
the Lindsays, III. 191.)
[Dr. Bretschneider (Hist. of Bot. Disc. I. p. 3) says: "In corroboration
of Polo's statement regarding the explosions produced when burning
bamboos, I may adduce Sir Joseph Hooker's Himalayan Journals (edition of
1891, p. 100), where in speaking of the fires in the jungles, he says:
'Their triumph is in reaching a great bamboo clump, when the noise of the
flames drowns that of the torrents, and as the great stem-joints burst,
from the expansion of the confined air, the report is as that of a salvo
from a park of artillery.'" - H. C]
[Illustration: Mountaineers on the Borders of Sze ch'wan and Yun-nan.]
Richthofen remarks that nowhere in China does the bamboo attain such a
size as in this region. Bamboos of three palms in girth (28 to 30 inches)
exist, but are not ordinary, I should suppose, even in Sze-ch'wan. In 1855
I took some pains to procure in Pegu a specimen of the largest attainable
bamboo. It was 10 inches in diameter.
NOTE 3. - M. Gabriel Durand, a missionary priest, thus describes his
journey in 1861 to Kiangka, via Ta-t'sien-lu, a line of country partly
coincident with that which Polo is traversing: "Every day we made a
journey of nine or ten leagues, and halted for the night in a Kung-kuan.
These are posts dotted at intervals of about ten leagues along the road to
Hlassa, and usually guarded by three soldiers, though the more important
posts have twenty. With the exception of some Tibetan houses, few and far
between, these are the only habitations to be seen on this silent and
deserted road.... Lytang was the first collection of houses that we had
seen in ten days' march." (Ann. de la Propag. de la Foi, XXXV. 352
seqq.)
NOTE 4. - Such practices are ascribed to many nations. Martini quotes
something similar from a Chinese author about tribes in Yunnan; and Garnier
says such loose practices are still ascribed to the Sifan near the
southern elbow of the Kin-sha Kiang.
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