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was favorable; and after fourteen days, sailing day and night, they came to the country of Singhala.” ( Travels , chap, xxxvii. )
“To Damirica” came the eastern shipping, according to the text; that is, the Chera backwaters were a meeting-point for the trade from the China Sea to the Gulf of Suez. Our author did not meet these vessels at Nelcynda, because the same monsoon that brought them would have taken him away.
Marco Polo tells us something of this trade in his day (III, xxv) : “There is in this kingdom of Melibar a great quantity of pepper, and ginger, and cinnamon, and turbit, and of nuts of India. They also manufacture very delicate and beautiful buckrams. The ships that come from the east bring coffee in ballast. They also bring hither cloths of silk and gold, and sendels; also gold and silver, cloves and spikenard, and other fine spices.”
See Holdich, Tibet the Mysterious ; — Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas; — Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet; — Waddell, Lhasa and its Mysteries; Younghusband, The Geographical Results of the Tibet Alission, in Geographical Journal, xxv, 1905; — Crosby, Tibet and Turk- estan; Candler, The Unveiling of Lhasa; — Landon, Lhasa , and The Opening of Tibet; — Sarat Chandra Das, Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet; — Littledale, A Journey across Tibet; — Deasy, In Tibet and Chinese Turkestan ; — Carey, Adventures in Tibet ; — Sandberg, The Exploration of Tibet; — Tsybikoff, Lhasa and Central Tibet (Smithsonian Report, 1903); — Prjevalski, Mongolia , the Tangut Country , and the Solitudes of Northern Tibet; — Sherring, Jfestern Tibet and the British Borderland.
64. Few men come from there, and seldom. — Until the subjugation of Turkestan by China, travel and trade overland were naturally hazardous. The routes through Tibet and upper Burma were never so actively used as those leading through the Pamirs. For this, racial and topographical reasons were alike responsible.
See Lassen, I, 167-9; — Kemp, The Face of China ; also, for a most useful and detailed account of a recent journey along the little- travelled Burmese route, R. F. Johnston, From Peking to Mandalay. Another theory, outlined by Kingsmill ( The Mantse and the Golden Chersonese , and Ancient Tibet and its Frontagers, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, China Branch, xxxv and xxxvii), and Terrien de La- couperie (in his introduction to Colquhoun’s Among the Shans), locates this entire traffic in upper Burma; identifying Thinae with Theinni, the Burmese form of Hsen-wi, or the Northern Shans, and with Tien y the name given by Marco Polo to the Chinese province of Yunnan. (See also Rocher, La Province Chinoise de Yunnan A But whatever may be the relation of Ptolemy’s Since and Cosmas’ Tzinista to Burma,
