Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia (1603-1721)

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To many generations of geographers Central Asia, especially Tibet, was the land of mystery and darkness, isolated by nature and by man, in whose midst lay the sacred city of Lhasa, even more mysterious and unapproachable than Mecca or Kerbela; and it is only for some decades past that it has counted among the great fields of operation of modern geography. High as Mont Blanc are the desert-like plateaux of this "Roof of the World". And as if this elevation was not enough to render them difficult of access, they are set about by almost impassable mountain ranges; an arctic climate reigns in those bleak and forlorn regions. And if a traveller be so undaunted and hardy as to brave all the obstacles of nature, and to climb his way towards those icy wastes, he will find his road barred and himself ruthlessly turned back by the sparse inhabitants, inhospitable as their mountain sides. Hardly any explorer from Prejevalsky to Sven Hedin but testifies to the jealousy with which those desolate regions are guarded, and even as late as 1923 Dr. Montgomery McGovern experienced this inveterate distrust of the foreigner.

It has not always been thus. This aversion did not exist in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before Chinese domination had influenced Tibet and grafted its own love of seclusion on its inhabitants. It was this milder feeling towards strangers from the West that allowed some Jesuit missionaries to explore the country. They entered it from the south and from the north, they traversed it along the valleys of the Indus and the Tsangpo, they saw men and things unseen by any European before, they encountered hardships and dangers not less formidable than those for which we rightly admire explorers of a later date-and yet while the labours of other Jesuits contributed so largely to the opening up of China, the Philippines, Abyssinia and wide tracts of North and South America, Tibet practically remained an unknown country. They did, indeed, like their fellow-workers in other climates, record their experiences, but, strange to say, most of their writings remained hidden away in dusty archives, and the few things given to the world were vague and hazy and, to some minds, more suggestive of fiction than of fact, and thus cast a shadow of un- certainty even over the few facts that had actually become known, justifying Hedin's remark that "over the interior of the vast Asiatic Continent there hovered a pale reflection, faint and shadowy. Of the journeys of Marco Polo and the old Jesuits" 1).

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